Fireproof Raj Kamal Jha Picador, 352pp, £12.99

Are good intentions enough to make a good novel? That's the central dilemma posed by Raj Kamal Jha in his third novel, Fireproof. The author of the acclaimed novel The Blue Bedspread, which he followed with If You Are Afraid of Heights, Jha is an editor at the Indian Express, and he has carried his roles - journalist and novelist - with aplomb.

Fireproof is set around the ghastly events in Gujarat five years ago, when a Muslim mob torched a train in Godhra in circumstances still being disputed. Many of the dead were Hindu militants returning from Ayodhya, where they wanted to build a temple for Lord Rama marking the supposed site of his birth. The site had been occupied by a 16th-century mosque, but in 1992 it was razed by a Hindu mob.

What is not in dispute is the planned retaliatory violence that followed the Godhra attack. Hindu mobs went on a rampage throughout Gujarat, and the authorities encouraged, if not colluded, with violence that left nearly 1,042 dead, including 784 Muslims. Not only was the retaliation an affront to justice, but the killing, rape, burning and mutilation had a stomach-churning cruelty about it. Within a month, Human Rights Watch produced an excellent report, entitled We Have No Orders to Save You, that exposed the state's complicity. It was followed by the ultimate travesty: the state government was re-elected. But slowly India's supreme court has offered some redress.

When the facts are this horrendous, what can fiction do? Jha weaves a complex tale about a middle-class man called Jay, who brings his wife to a hospital the night the city loses its sanity. She is about to deliver their first child. He is shocked when he sees it, a severely deformed baby with bright eyes, but neither limbs nor any other recognisable organs, and a body looking charred. Yet Jay develops a bond with his son, calling him ItHim (as the child is an "it" and a "him"), and cares for him, walking him through malls, taking him to films, and visiting cybercafés. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman, Miss Glass, pursues him, asking him to help her. Later, she sends him emails and documents suggesting that she would help set the baby right.

Jay follows the instructions reluctantly, and gradually uncovers the truth about what really happened in Godhra. Guiding him along are short soliloquies from unnamed victims of the violence, calm testimonies that describe what happened to them and articulate their quotidian concerns. The novel's central conceit is that all these characters, including Miss Glass and a dwarf who escorts Jay, are already dead.

Jha uses various devices to get his point across - there are photographs of places destroyed by rioters, a map showing an apparently inconsequential route Jay takes, and some of the dead characters speak only in cloying rhyme. Finally, three objects - a book, a watch and a towel - lead us towards the climax, as if they were characters in a play. While the scenario is as absurd as that of a Beckett play, it lacks the sardonic humour necessary to take it beyond the surreal. In fact, Fireproof's patchwork of styles - reportage, photography, theatre, testimonies - simply does not work, and the novel never rises above the sum of its parts. However gory the violence, it leaves you numb.

The genesis of the novel was an article Jha wrote about a burnt textbook he found near the Gulbarga Society in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city, where 38 people were burnt alive. He was there as a "riot tourist", like other reporters and photographers. In that textbook, he found an essay about a blind man and his dog, and how the blind man used his wits to save himself from a fire that engulfed his room.

Jha's point is that the victims of the Gujarat riots could not do so, because they were killed by a sinister force to which the society around them remained blind. ItHim sees everything but cannot say anything about it; the people around him are unwilling to see the carnage. "How easy it is for the living to deceive themselves," the dead say.

Jha's heart is in the right place: he is outraged, as are many Indians, by what happened in Gujarat. But moral outrage alone cannot make great fiction, which is supposed to take us beyond facts and explore truths.

Jha has the advantage of distance from the immediacy of the events. But instead of insights, he offers us glimpses of a movie like M Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, where the dead speak, or David Lynch's Eraserhead, where a father has to deal with a severely deformed child. Is Fireproof a homage to those directors? Is it a response to the riots? Does fictionalising the horror magnify it? Or does it trivialise it by making us feel how improbable everything is? By shrouding the novel with dreams and unreality, Jha may end up reinforcing the complacency among many in Gujarat, a complacency that comes from suspending disbelief.

At an inspiring moment in the novel, Miss Glass tells her friends, who are depressed by the injustice of their deaths, that the dead have all the time in the world. But alas, in the real world, the dead don't speak, which is why we must remember their stories. For that, we need something more durable than Fireproof.

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