FICTION: PATRICIA CRAIGreviews The Girl in the Polka Dot DressBy Beryl Bainbridge Little, Brown, 197pp. £16.99

IT'S THE SUMMER OF 1968, and the United States is in turmoil: race riots, violence and desperation, Martin Luther King assassinated, opposition to the Vietnam War erupting in street protests, black smoke from burning buildings curling into the sky. "The world was menacing and full of alarms" is how an earlier Beryl Bainbridge character put it (in Injury Time), but none of it impinges greatly on Rose, the English girl in the polka-dot dress, as she travels across the US in a camper van, all the way from Baltimore to the Pacific coast, in the company of a bleak individual named Harold, whom she hardly knows. Harold, though redeemed by a fondness for cats, is prone to stomach pains and irritation, along with crass anticipations.

Rose is the latest – the last – in a series of Bainbridge protagonists defined by a robust and endearing querulousness. They are devious and innocent and quirky and self-willed. Among them are Madge ( A Quiet Life), Binny ( Injury Time) and Stella ( An Awfully Big Adventure), and to this intrepid company is added Rose, who has on her mind a more urgent personal matter than the derangement and dishevelment pervading the towns and citites of the US. Rose is eager to re-establish contact with a person from her past, an elusive Dr Wheeler, who spent some time in England years ago, and rescued the girl (she believes) from an agitated adolescence on the Lancashire coast.

Harold, too, is in pursuit of Dr Wheeler, though with a more sinister end in view, and the two unlikely allies have joined forces in the trailing enterprise. They have clues to follow, but Wheeler, like TS Eliot’s Macavity, is never where they expect to find him. He keeps one step ahead, and the final step brings him, and them, to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Senator Robert Kennedy is about to be shot. At this point the novel peters out.

Disturbing incidents have occurred along the way: the funeral of a dead soldier flown home from Saigon; the bundling into a patrol car of an angry black woman; Harold being punched to the ground by a friend. Towards the end, Rose notices a dark young man wearing a yellow sweater, and someone tells her his name is Sirhan (the name of the Kennedy assassin). Rose herself is conflated, in the author’s mind, with a girl supposedly seen running away from the hotel, and out of the Kennedy story, in the wake of the shooting. This girl is wearing a white dress with small black spots, hence the title of this final work by Bainbridge.

The journey, the discomforts, the friction, the deadpan approach to the grotesqueries of normal life are all familiar Bainbridge ingredients, and so is death, whether natural or unnatural. Death, as an idea and an actuality, is never too far away from comic exorbitance and pungency in the Bainbridge oeuvre, whether it's treated as a macabre joke, matter-of-factly, or as a kind of cryptic resolution. In the group of "historical" novels that she began writing in the 1990s, death is less a motif than a theme, as her subjects include the shipwreck of Titanic, Scott of the Antarctic and war in the Crimea. If the engaging heroines of the earlier novels are absent from some of these works, they make a comeback in the third of them, Master Georgie(1998), in the person of the educated foundling Myrtle. In this outstanding novel, too, the increased density of the historical background points up the author's laconic, ironic eloquence.

With The Girl in the Polka Dot DressBainnbridge returns to an earlier narrative strategy. She herself travelled across the US in 1968, and experienced some of the things she recounts in the novel. Autobiography, again, set her going at the end. "I am not very good at fiction . . . It is always me and the experiences I have had," she always maintained. Life plus a newspaper plot, she added sardonically, summed up the formula that fuelled her literary impulse. This is, like a number of her pronouncements, both true and not true. Fiction, invention, comes into it, and the artistry needed to orchestrate the workings of chance and illumination.

But it’s as much a matter of re-creation as inspiration. An atmosphere of strain and disquiet, for example, filled her childhood home (as she’s let us know) and drove her incessantly out among the sand dunes of the Mersey estuary. This atmosphere surfaces in one form or another in all of her 17 works of fiction, typically with a strong element of comedy and contretemps added.

The effect of her fraught and mysterious narrative goings-on is uniquely diverting and unsettling, and tied up with the author’s foot-off-the-ground aplomb. Her distinctive voice will be missed.

Every one of the Bainbridge novels is idiosyncratic, shrewd and intriguing in its own way, and the last is no exception, even if it isn’t quite complete. Bainbridge knew she was dying while she worked on this book, and as the end came in sight she had hoped for an extra allocation of days to allow her to finish her story. But it wasn’t to be.

Patricia Craig is a writer. Her most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble