FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Tiger's WifeBy Téa Obreht Weidenfeld Nicholson, 336pp. £12.99

NATALIA IS A DOCTOR, as was her beloved grandfather. But, unlike her, he was also a dreamer. He saw the romance that lies hidden in the smallest thing, and his mind remained alive with stories he had known since he was a boy. Central to his stories, now retold by the narrator, is the enduring image of a powerful tiger, silent, deadly and apparently immortal. The tiger appears to have been born of an event that occurred when the narrator's grandfather was a boy. A tiger escaped from the zoo and settled in the mountains above the town. The escape was the first step in creating a dazzling mythology of menace. But there was another factor, the well-worn old copy of The Jungle Bookthat the doctor kept in his pocket.

Throughout her childhood the narrator had been taken to the zoo by her grandfather, who loved all the animals, particularly the big cats. Within the first few paragraphs the visit to the zoo strikes a realistic note. Everyone is smiling and happy; the narrator recalls a woman with brown hair. A man is sweeping up the bits of popcorn that people have tossed in for the tigers.

“The dustpan keeper stops and leans against the handle of his broom, and as he does so, the big tiger sweeps by, rubbing against the bars of the cage, rumbling, and the keeper puts a hand through the bars and touches its flank. For a moment, nothing. And then pandemonium.” The outraged tiger grabs the man’s arm “the way a dog holds a large bone: upright between his paws, gnawing on the top.” The tiger eventually lets go and the keeper walks away, bleeding and embarrassed. His mood is not helped when the narrator’s grandfather informs the man that he is a fool. It is an impressive opening.

Téa Obreht was born in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985, before moving with her family, at the age of seven, first to Cyprus and then to Egypt, before settling in the US, where she has featured on the New Yorker's list of the top 20 writers under the age of 40. She has a strong sense of her native country's tragic history and the complex internal heritage created by contrasting and warring cultures. This runs through a fragmented, uneven narrative that draws heavily on folklore and anecdote and is poised uneasily between Natalia's dull description of the medical mission that she is on, bringing supplies into a war zone, and the more fantastical elements introduced by way of her grandfather's stories.

The old man goes off on a trip and dies. Natalia knew about his illness; it was one of the secrets that they had kept. His personal belongings are missing, including his Jungle Book. Always central is the image of the tiger: not one but several, or perhaps it is intended to be variations of the same tiger. Either way it is a metaphor for Obreht's country; this becomes increasingly obvious through the plight of Zbogom the tiger as he continues "to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black. In the end, without announcing it in the newspaper, they shot that legless tiger there, on the stone slab of his cage. The man who had raised him – the man who had nursed him, weighed him, gave him baths, the man who carried him around the zoo in a knapsack, the man whose hands appeared in every picture ever taken of the tiger as a cub – pulled the trigger. They say the tiger's mate killed and ate one of her cubs the following spring."

There are some beautiful fleeting images such as that of Lola, an ancient old bear that had once danced in a circus. In old age the bear is revered and loved, and ultimately mourned by her grieving master. The stories take over and expose the flatness of the passages in which the narrator is reporting on her daily life: “The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that were made of our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. Previously shared things – landmarks, writers, scientists, histories – had to be doled out according to their new owners. That Nobel Prize-winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal.”

None of the human characters, with the exception of the grandfather, measure up to the animals, particularly the courageous bears and the tormented tigers. At no stage does The Tiger's Wifeapproach the artistic cohesion of Yann Martel's 2002 Booker-wining Life of Pi,which was both adventure story and philosophical tract. Instead Obreht's charming if chaotic patchwork of fable and image, ebbs and flows, is told in sporadic bursts of inspiration and often falters. Early in the book the narrator recalls that the village in which her grandfather grew up does not appear on a map. "My grandfather never took me there, rarely mentioned it, never expressed longing or curiosity, or a desire to return." It seems very much in character of a man who lived – and survived – in his imagination.

The Tiger's Wifeis political polemic at its most naive. But Obreht is aware that her country was dismantled while she was still a child. This overhyped and loosely executed work, which has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, has a relevance that outweighs its many artistic shortcomings. While the narrative jolts and shudders beneath the burden of being a series of chapters rather than an organic whole, it conveys the cultural tensions prevailing throughout the Balkans, a forgotten world that looks to the East and to the West, belonging to both and to neither.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times