There's something disconcertingly wrong with Francis King's latest novel, but throughout most of The Woman Who Was God it's hard to put your finger on exactly what the problem is. Every time you think you've found a flaw, the novel justifies it by placing it in the context of the main character's thoughts. For instance, when we get a sentence like “The waves lisp in the luminous crescent of the beach, as they sweep in and then fold one over the other,” we think we've caught King in the act of over-writing—until we learn a page later that this sentence, like the rest of the short opening chapter, actually belongs to the character's vision: “She has imagined it as a novelist might have imagined it.”

The novel is cleverly written, but that very cleverness in the end proves to be its undoing. However, to begin with we are sucked in by the rather suspenseful plot. The “she” of the quotation given above is Ruth St. Just, whose only son has mysteriously perished on an island off the African coast, in a compound ruled over by one Madame Vilmorin. This lady-guru is called “Mother” by all her disciples, and King allows us to believe for most of the novel that she is the “woman” of the title. St. Just—British, divorced, a fading beauty, a somewhat impractical owner of a not-very-successful restaurant in the Cotswolds—gets no support for her suspicions from either her ex-husband or the British Foreign Office. She therefore resolves to sell her restaurant, travel alone to French-speaking Africa, and find out for herself what happened to her son. Most of the novel is an account of her journey and her eventual discoveries mainly as seen through her perceptions.

There are exceptions, however, to this point of view. Early on, for instance, we get a Foreign Office employee looking out his London window at her and thinking, “Tire-some woman!” And throughout the novel King interjects little foreshadowing messages, such as “Ruth was to get used to ancient servants being called ‘the boy,’” or “Unlike most of her dreams, it was not one that she forgot on waking or, indeed ever forgot.” Who is telling us these things, if not Ruth? Are they meant to shake our impression that hers is in fact the perceiving sensibility of the novel? Are they intended to create a feeling of impending doom? Or are they merely Francis King's attempt to have it both ways—to pretend to be inside his main character and at the same time show us he knows more than she does?

The real problem with the novel is that it utterly lacks empathy. In a satire like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities such an absence may not be particularly noticeable (though I noticed it and disliked it even there). But in a novel that's ostensibly about personal loss and grief the lack of feeling is a major hole in the fabric.

At one point Ruth thinks about a reporter's article on her “case”: “Sad, lonely, bewildered, bereaved, frustrated: well, yes, no doubt she was all those things, but she did not like him to call her them in print.” But it is King who really commits that journalistic error; it is he who seems to think he can convey this woman without identifying with her. That flaw becomes most noticeable in our utter lack of sadness about the lost son. Granted, we never knew him. But neither did we know the kidnapped little girl in Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, yet McEwan's novel is a wrenching, moving, terrifying portrait of a father confronting the loss of his child.

The Woman Who Was God, on the other hand, is a cold, calculated and, finally, unsuccessful effort to entrap the reader in a woman's anxieties. As a few throwaway remarks suggest (Ruth gets off the airplane in Africa, “the last of the passengers but for a mother with two small, fractiously bleating children”), this author doesn't even like children as a class; he's certainly unable to make us understand why a parent would mourn the loss of one of them.

King's excuse (this is a novel built around such booby-trap excuses) might be that it is Ruth, and not himself, who lacks feeling. But the problem is really the other way around. In King's vision, the characters have no integrity or existence of their own; they exist only to play a part in his pathologically clever plot. This book might well have been called The Author Who Was God—but in that case it would have made atheists of us all.