In her two previous novels, The Birthday Boys and Every Man for Himself, Beryl Bainbridge took her fiction in a new direction, creating a distinctive kind of historical novel. Like all of her books, these were slender works, not so much small as concentrated: it has always seemed to me that a Bainbridge sentence carries twice the information of the ordinary variety, and she practices a ruthless selectivity. But unlike her earlier novels, which focused mainly on individuals grappling with their lives, these gave her characters a wider stage: casting them as participants in a man-made tragedy symbolic of its time—Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Polar expedition in one case and the sinking of the Titanic in the other—enabled Bainbridge to interweave societal issues with the individuals' own. Although I didn't find these novels equally successful. Bainbridge's method in both seemed to me ingenious: the contrast between spareness and scope gave a sense of viewing events through a zoom lens that somehow had a wide-angle capability as well.

The photographic analogy seems particularly apt for Bainbridge's latest work, Master Georgie, another slim novel set against the backdrop of a man-made tragedy: the Crimean War. Notorious for senseless carnage and the abominable treatment of troops, this conflagration was also known for the war photography it produced: technological innovations achieved not long before the war enabled correspondents to send home pictures from the front for the first time.

Fittingly, Bainbridge gives photography a central role in her novel, not only by making two of her main characters photographers, by centering each of the book's sections around a photograph and by rendering the prose highly descriptive, almost photographic, but also by using the subject of photography to express ideas about perception and reality that are crucial to the novel. If these themes threaten heavy-handed reading, quite the opposite is the case. Master Georgie jostles along so easily, so much of it seems trivial or playful, that while one is reading it is difficult to know what if anything really matters, what the story is actually about and whether, adding up Master Georgie's vivid scenes, a meaningful Big Picture will emerge. This effect seems to me part of Bainbridge's intention—and there is nothing in this consciously written book that is not intentional.

Master Georgie opens in Liverpool, in 1846 and takes us by a sequence of disjointed episodes to the Crimean battlefield in 1854. The book's six sections are narrated in rotation by three of the central characters, each of whom is linked in some way to the fourth, George Hardy, a young doctor interested in the newly developing art and technology of photography. The narrators, a bizarre trio, include Myrtle, a foundling raised by the Hardy family and obsessively devoted to George, whom she calls Master Georgie; Pompey Jones, a street-smart boy whom George takes under his wing; and Dr. Potter, a philosophizing geologist who marries George's sister. All four will end up in the Crimea, though the moves that carry the story forward can be hard to discern.

This narrative indirection is striking from the first. In the opening section, Myrtle describes how, at the age of twelve, already so devoted to Georgie that she followed him like a shadow, she was present when he accidentally discovered his father dead in a brothel bed. With the help of Pompey, who got hold of a Punch and Judy van, the three carted the corpse home to his own bed, thus concealing the truth of his scandalous demise.

There is such a strong element of farce in this scene that it is easy to dismiss it as insignificant. Only later can we trace how the death and shared cover-up are pivotal in all three of the lives concerned and help lead each to the Crimea. First, the affair so affects George—Potter tells us—that he falls apart, turns to drink, never entirely recovers and in regret for “wasted opportunities, lack of application, etc.” offers his services in the Crimea, believing the war will be a “prop.” “A man like me needs something to hold him upright,” he says, a remark that will turn out to be grotesquely funny.

Second, the event appears to intensify Myrtle's already intense devotion to Georgie into such an obsession that she eventually chooses—almost incredibly—to bear his children when his wife proves unable, and to follow him to the Crimea when he seeks to offer his medical services because “she is unable to let George out of her sight.” Third, the episode wins young Pompey the patronage of George, who trains him as a photographer, an occupation that takes him to the Crimea on an assignment for a newspaper. Actually, it might be said that the circumstances of Mr. Hardy's death lead even Potter to the Crimea, since the decision to make the “ill-advised excursion” is George's more than his own, and he accompanies his brother-in-law in the belief that he might be of use as an observer.

Reading back, it is possible to trace all of these effects to the first grimly farcical scene, but it requires effort; nothing is made plain. By forcing us to piece it together in hindsight. Bainbridge suggests how difficult it is in life to read forward, to see ahead of time what will ultimately matter in part because so much is accidental: had George not wandered down a particular street he would not have come upon that brothel; if Pompey had not been nearby, he would never have met George; both lives might have been entirely different.

And by forcing us to piece it out, Bainbridge also provokes us to ask ourselves what “the story” here really is, what the whole that we are putting together amounts to. Is the novel, as its title suggests, the story of George Hardy? But he is the one we know least about; his, after all, is the voice that is missing. We are never inside his head, we never hear his view of his father's death, his mother's manipulation, Myrtle and those children. We perceive him only through the eyes of his companions, each of whom sees him differently. We gradually learn about his drinking, his homosexuality. But viewing him externally, we hear only what people choose to tell, which may not even be true, and which does not add up to a portrait.

This question of how much we can really perceive of the truth, the entire picture, by what we see from the outside seems to me central to the book. The inability to gain an accurate overview of what is happening is evident in Bainbridge's depiction of the war: witnessed from the ground, by our narrators, the battles appear as vivid individual frames of mud and slaughter that do not coalesce into any meaningful whole. “I didn't know what cause I was promoting, or why it was imperative to kill,” says Pompey, as he makes his way, with Myrtle, through the bloodshed.

The question of what can be perceived—and whether there is any truth to perceive—is underscored by the use of photography in the book. Each section bears the title of a plate that refers to a photograph, taken in that section, which, as the accompanying narrative makes clear, in some way distorts reality. In the first section, for example, the described photograph of Myrtle with the corpse of Mr. Hardy in his bed makes it look as if he'd died in bed which is true, as Myrtle observes, if “one didn't dwell on which particular bed.” Still more distorting, the final photograph, “Smile, Boys, Smile,” taken by a war photographer to show folks back home a group of survivors, includes a corpse, propped up to appear to be among the living. These are posed photos, of course, artfully arranged. But then, narratives are artfully arranged as well.

Master Georgie is a meticulously constructed novel and, as always, Bainbridge's controlled prose is a pleasure to read, even when she is describing terrible carnage. It may come as a surprise, then, when I say that I didn't really find it worked all that well as a novel. To me, it felt too conspicuously constructed, the story too contrived and the characters too artificial.

To believe that life is as accidental as Bainbridge suggests. I need to believe that the accidents she depicts could occur: here, I felt they were contrived to achieve their effect—to connect people who would not otherwise have been connected, to transport characters to the Crimea who would not otherwise have been there. To believe in the bizarreness of people. I need to believe in the people; but for me these characters were never more than an arrangement of the characteristics Bainbridge gave them. As they wander through the Crimea, each may bring a different viewpoint—Myrtle drawing strength from the proximity of Georgie, Pompey surviving as he did in the streets of Liverpool, Potter so overwhelmed by the horror of his situation that he loses his bearings and mentally retreats. But they all tend to sound like Bainbridge herself. Here, for example, is Pompey on the battlefield:

The carnage was horrid. Men died posed like the statues in Mr. Blundell's glass-house. I saw a horse crumpled on its chest, its rider with his arm held up as though he breasted a river. I saw two men on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands. On the wall, stuck to the steps of a ladder, a grenadier clutched at the steel that pinned him like a butterfly.

This is wonderful writing. But is it really a young man from the streets of Liverpool speaking? I felt so detached from the characters that while Potter was reflecting on what had brought him to the Crimea, whether it was fate or chance. I found myself offering up a third possibility: the author. This isn't really what a reader should be thinking. Master Georgie seems to me a novel to appreciate rather than to love—for its prose, its observations, and its clear-eyed view of our imperfect vision.