FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Anatomy of a DisappearanceBy Hisham Matar Viking, 247pp. £16.99

NURI’S CHILDHOOD was abruptly ended when his mother died. Her absence left an emptiness that was not filled by a growing intimacy with his father. Instead, his father became more detached. Then, while on holiday with his father, Nuri, still only a boy and yet in ways a man, first sees Mona, a beautiful young woman. But his father also notices Mona who charms the child yet marries the man.

This elegant second novel from the author of In the Country of Men– shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize, which it should have won – is graceful and sophisticated with subtle hints of Nabokov, yet is also gentle and wistful. Tormented by his resentment of his father's successful wooing of Mona, the son often dreamed of taking her from the older man. When his father disappears, Nuri is left heartbroken and guilty.

Five years after making an impressive debut about a young boy who watches his mother’s periodic collapses during his father’s business trips, Hisham Matar has returned to the theme of an absent father and an only son remembering the past, but has written a very different novel.

In In the Country of Menthe narrator recalls events that took place at home in Libya when he was nine years old. It all begins with the unexpected sighting of his father in a street in Tripoli. But his father is away. It marks the beginning of series of menacing events. Matar, who has recently written such fine pieces about developments in Libya, evokes the panic and confusion felt by a child confronted by things he can not quite understand. While his mother slips between moods of despair and resentment, the boy wonders about the dangerous men who arrive at the house demanding information.

Matar paints a graphic picture of life in Libya under a regime that relies on fear and mistrust. A show trial and execution take place at the national basketball stadium and are televised. The narrator watches; the condemned man is the father of one of his friends. Yet the novel never becomes a polemic. After his father returns badly beaten and ashamed, the child realises life will never be the same again and is sent off to school in Cairo. The prose is simple; the narrator assumes the clarity of a child’s version of events. It is a fine novel and, as events of the past week have unfolded, reads as a story, beautiful and brutal, told with a festering tone of truth and dread.

Anatomy of a Disappearanceshows a stylistic maturity. Matar the storyteller is honing his art. Nuri the man and son looks back at the teenager he once was, in love with a woman who proves calculating and cold, hardly the stuff of a heroine. His father had been part of the previous Libyan regime and was an adviser to the king. It takes years before he realises that the father who had been his rival for Mona, was actually a hero. When his father marries Mona, the narrator is despatched to an expensive though spartan boarding school in England. The deliberate act of distancing him from his father and new stepmother is her idea. The boy retreats, bruised and hurt. But then he is summoned back to the family fold. The three are to celebrate Christmas in Switzerland.

Nuri and Mona are to be joined by the father. Matar sustains a sense of erotic curiosity. Nuri is besotted, while Mona is involved in a game of her own. However, the father never joins them. Instead, he is abducted from the bed of a Swiss woman. Again Matar is very confident in his handling of the mixed emotions, fear at his disappearance, but rage – particularly from Mona – at the circumstances. Reading Anatomy of a Disappearance, an accomplished narrative, rich in regret yet also impressively restrained as related by a son whose sense of guilt is caught up with a growing awareness of loss, does not detract from the achievements of the first book. Both are different, yet share an ability to be highly politically charged without being reduced to polemic.

In Anatomy of a Disappearance, Matar gives a powerful sense of the sinister menace and secrecy that have dictated the recent history of Libya.

Nuri’s father’s abduction (obviously political, though Matar does not labour this) preys on Nuri’s mind. As the years pass he recalls the man he barely knew and wonders what would have happened had his father had the chance to see him grow and have children of his own. He thinks of the potential “emotional eloquence and ease”. But the reality was different. “ . . . now the distances that had then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap between us continue to shape him in my thoughts.”

Without solving the mystery of what happened to his father, Nuri, although grown, is left in a state of arrested childhood, he thinks his father’s clothes have shrunk but it is he who has grown and is reluctant to admit he fills his father’s suits. Late in the novel the narrator witnesses an episode in which a fully clothed man attempts to climb out of a river. People are watching, and it is not clear if he was pushed, or if he fell, or if it is a suicide attempt. But the image lingers. Hisham Matar, in this wise, thoughtful, beautiful and moving novel makes clear that survival is always possible, living is just that bit more difficult.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times