Netherland

Is the failure of love as much to do with our sense of time and place as the feelings we have towards the other person in the relationship? Thirtysomething Dutch banker Hans van den Broek, the narrator of Joseph O'Neill's superb third novel, moves to New York with his English wife Rachel and their young son for work only to have his marriage collapse in the aftermath of 9/11.

Rachel cites the insecurity bred by a new age of terror as well as her husband's alleged neglect. A key theme in Netherland is the extent to which some part of us may allow external factors to shape the narrative of our private lives. Whether wider events are the direct cause of or merely a catalyst for our emotional turmoil is not always easy to discern.

It could be that sexual love just runs out after a time. Yet we seem to need to provide ourselves with an explanation that fits in with the autobiographical narrative each of us constructs and which in turn we project back onto history itself.

The New York Hans inhabits after Rachel leaves him and returns to London is old and new, familiar and unexpected. Left alone, Hans is "afflicted" by the troubling insights that are the curse of the solitary.

Hans cannot summon the desire to start a relationship with someone else. "I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum."

Being Dutch emerges as a potential source of pride. "You know that you are a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians," a friend tells Hans. "The word 'Yankee' itself," he is informed, "came from that simplest of Dutch names - Jan."

New York proves surprisingly congenial when Hans rediscovers his boyhood love of cricket. Indeed, Netherland is largely a novel about a sport that may seem exotic in an American setting but in fact has deep historical roots there. "Cricket was the first modern team sport in America," Hans discovers. "It came before baseball and football. Cricket has been played in New York since the 1770s."

O'Neill's unkempt local ground once hosted the gods of the game. "Donald Bradman and Garry Sobers, the greatest cricketers of all time, have played at Walker Park." Just getting involved brings solace: "I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to the cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice." Though when one spectator brings a gun onto the field in reaction to an umpiring decision, it is very nearly a war plus rather than minus the shooting.

Hans' interest in cricket is stimulated by a new-found friend. Chuck Rambkissen is a Trinidadian Arthur Daley figure, wheeling and dealing, ducking and diving. Chuck's big dream is to build a cricket stadium in New York.

Hans is charmed by this less than plausible rogue. "Because his deviousness was so transparent, and because it alternated with an immigrant's credulousness - his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Cox and Box, never to meet - I found all the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing."

At one point Chuck offers to give Hans driving lessons so he can qualify for a New York licence, only for Hans to find that he has been employed as an unwitting chauffeur. In Chuck's line of business, the sight of a black man being driven around town by a white man is viewed with respect.

One of Rachel's parting remarks is she feels that the narrative of her life with Hans no longer has any direction. After living briefly with a celebrity chef, she and Hans gradually find themselves once again sharing a story, at the centre of which is their son.

Reconciliation in such circumstances may seem more likely in fiction than it is in real life. In a novel of this quality, however, a happy ending is no less satisfying for being just that.