After These Things Jenny Diski Little, Brown, 224pp, £14.99 ISBN 0316725269

Biblical stories rarely get the adap-tations that they deserve. Think of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, or Anita Diamant's blandly feminist bestseller The Red Tent, and, most recently, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a near-pornographic gore-fest that manages to be at once naff, nasty and unforgivably boring. Jenny Diski's last novel, Only Human, proved an exception to this divine rule. A terse, spiky depiction of the world's first love triangle - Sarah, Abraham and his God - it was unfettered by piety and animated by a belief in the power of storytelling.

Now its sequel, After These Things, picks up where the last book ended, with that nightmarish episode atop Mount Moriah. In Only Human, this event is the culmination of Abraham's stormy relationship with his God; here, how- ever, it stands as the defining moment in Isaac's existence, and although Pa's sharp blade never so much as grazes the boy's skin, he is scarred for life by the thought of death. "He had known for many years, decades, almost a lifetime how close death was. Closer than breath, closer than love, closer than future," Diski writes of an aged Isaac.

But this is also the story of Isaac's twins, the "womb-brothers" Jacob and Esau. Together with Isaac, they form human-kind's first proper family, destined as such to quarrel, mourn and watch their dreams grow dim with the passing of time. Yet they are also "Homo fabulans", as Diski dubs them, "creatures who uniquely weld together bits of stuff - memory, fantasy and dream - into stories".

And herein lies the root of their discontent: they expect their lives to form coherent narratives and are rewarded instead with "formlessness and futility", with the knowledge that "there was no story, only life and death, disordered, pointless and accidental". Or at least, that is how it seems to them, as the whole is overseen by "the great Redactor", an unreachable editor who looks down with wry, world-weary amusement and who may be the author, or may be the huffy "God-the-Narrator" whom Diski created in Only Human - a jealous, moody lord, all too human and prone to tantrums.

How early in the story of family the pattern emerges: One generation, two, and already the serpent is chasing its tail. Family, not-family, love, not-love, duty and consequences. But no surprises, even so soon, no surprises . . .

the voice intones here. Although the novel keeps in step with the Bible, key episodes such as when Esau trades his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew are related after the event. As the title suggests, what really interests Diski is the psychological fallout - this is a story about interpreting, or editing, if you will. One by one, Diski attempts to construct inner lives for each of these biblical characters: for loveless Leah; for beautiful Rachel, teetering on the "chasm of childlessness"; and for Rebekah, the wife whom Isaac fills with bleakness.

However, if the Bible seems unkind to women, then men fare no better in Diski's version. Like the women, their main role is to procreate; as Rebekah yells at her husband, "What is the point of you if you don't make children?" And while Isaac lingers on his deathbed, the heart of his trickster son, Jacob, becomes constricted by the "webs of consequence": he wins Esau's birthright only to find himself cast into exile; he discovers a love that makes the years pass like days, only to end up a pawn between two feuding, embittered sisters.

Diski has crafted a potent, cannily layered fable, but After These Things lacks some of the passion, the lightning bolts and quick wit of Only Human. Ultimately, it lacks her God.

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