The Zigzag Way Anita Desai Chatto & Windus, 182pp, 12.99 ISBN 0701177438

Anita Desai is justifiably renowned for her keen, subtle eye and her calmly elegant prose. She is also a mistress of synecdoche, a writer whose delicate portraits of the quotidian resonate outwards to convey tumultuous swathes of history. Although the characters in Clear Light of Day (1980) barely venture beyond their front gate, they live out the legacy of India's bitter battle for independence. Hers is a miniaturist's gift, precise, deft and powerful.

In The Zigzag Way, Desai turns her eye to a new continent. Set in Mexico, the novel weaves together the travels of a young American named Eric, an aged Austrian eccentric named Dona Vera, and a long-dead Cornish miner's wife, Betty Jennings. Through them, Desai sets out to depict the upheavals of 20th-century Mexico, primarily relating to the gold and silver mines in the Sierra Madre. We are introduced to the ongoing plight of the indigenous Huichols; to the difficult lives of the British miners, stranded far from home in the early part of the century; and to the effect, during that time, of Pancho Villa's revolution.

In addition to a thumbnail history of Mexico, Desai offers splendid descriptions of nature:

Thunderheads had risen above the horizon and were mounting with swift strides through the sky, casting a shadow across the mesa and the lake as if a fisherman had flung out a net over them that softly settled.

And yet, while this novel contains many examples of Desai's distinctive painterly talents, it lacks the synthetic power that can render her work so affecting. Fundamentally, The Zigzag Way confronts a conundrum of character, or rather, of lack thereof: Desai's primary interest is manifestly the country itself, its landscape and the curious details of its history, rather than the individuals with whom she has peopled it. In a novel preoccupied with spirits, her creations are of a ghostly thinness, their actions desultory, their natures unrealised.

Eric, the nominal engine of the plot (if plot there can be said to be), leaves Boston for Mexico on account of his girlfriend, Em (whose own studies are of a nebulous sort: "Her field was the forests of Yucatan where mosquitoes teemed and malaria was rife" - Anthropology? Archaeology? Epidemiology? Zoology?). And of Eric, Desai writes: "'I might come across - um, something in Mexico that would put me on the right track,' he said in what he hoped was a confident tone." As if aware that this is not sufficient catalyst for his upheaval, Desai has Eric discover, on the eve of his departure, that his British father was born there. "But how strange, Eric - not to know where your dad was born!" Em exclaims, voicing precisely the reader's own scepticism; to which he replies: "Well, you know my family is strange." Alas, it is a strangeness - rather like Em's subject of study - to which we are not privy.

Although no more complex, Dona Vera is mercifully more colourful than Eric: a grande dame surrounded by acolytes and snappy pug dogs, inhabiting the imposingly gothic Hacienda de la Soledad, holding forth - with only her own trumped-up authority - upon the lives of the Huichols and their dependence on peyote. Desai grants her an intriguing but hazy past among the Nazis in her native Austria; but this, like so much else in the novel, proves merely a detail. The novel's third main character, Betty Jennings, is Eric's grandmother, who died in childbirth at the time of a local uprising and lies buried in the mining town's hilltop cemetery. She is a plucky and appealing potential heroine, but serves largely, as she is written, to record historical details about the Corn-ish men in the mines, to give birth, and to expire for narrative convenience.

All in all, The Zigzag Way seems a hasty and undigested effort, one that perforce highlights some of Desai's impressive talents, but ultimately fails to cohere, or to come alive, as a novel. The reader is left with too many questions: Who is Eric and why is he here? What does Em study? If Eric's father was born before the First World War, but Eric and Em seemingly lead thoroughly contemporary lives, then when is the novel set? (And if he became a father near the age of 70, ought that not to merit a mention?) What exactly is Dona Vera's narrative role? Or the significance of Betty to Eric? And why ought we to care? Only Mexico itself emerges as a fully realised entity, this book's inspiration and its passionately drawn centre; but perhaps a better subject for non-fiction.

Claire Messud's most recent book is The Hunters: two novellas (Picador)

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