THE FAITHFUL COUPLE
By A.D. Miller. Hachette. $29.99

Some wonderfully grim novels have been framed around the intertwined themes of revenge and regret, remorse and retribution. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment remains the most demanding of those books, but The Faithful Couple might be fairly placed in the same sort of company or category.

Miller's two main characters, Neil and Adam, are neither faithful nor a couple. They are simply good mates, who share a holiday camping in Yosemite national park, then drift apart, in the United States, in London, and – for an odd interlude – in Baku. Their tale is told in eight episodes, arranged in neat chronological sequence and running from 1993 to 2011.

Miller wrote earlier a challenging, compelling novel about moral choices in Russia, Snowdrops. London and Yosemite (even Baku) pose fewer acute tests for the conscience, and the action in The Faithful Couple can therefore seem a bit soft, slow and sedate compared with Snowdrops.

The crux of the plot is one incident in Yosemite, which commences when a girl snatches a hat in a high meadow, proceeds through a bit of fumbling with underwear, and ends with the girl emerging from one of the mates' tents first thing in the morning. The friends' guilt reflects not merely fear of a "thunderbolt disaster" in the form of the law (though that is vividly evoked for a while) but also their disappointment in themselves. The girl, after all, "was the contest more than she was the prize".

There is ample reason for censure and concern in that scene, but Neil and Adam are not Raskolnikov. He was haunted, obsessed and consumed by guilt. Miller's two anti-heroes do suffer retrospective qualms of conscience, but those fade in and out, just as the incident itself blurs and fuzzes at the edges as the years go by.

Both men move into essentially inconsequential jobs, despite the interlude when one of them tries to sell products "selling new ways to tell your family that you love them". Neil and Adam are a somewhat prissy and pernickety pair, fussy about sex, insufficiently captivated by a baby, unduly ready to take offence. They bump around with each other, and bump up against each other, but not much friction or tension results.

Miller writes well, fluently and intimately, about many things. He can sometimes revert to rather academic jargon. One of the characters, for instance, learns in bureaucratic meetings to "sequester your credit from predators". That is not the kind of advice usually imparted to public servants going into IDCs. Generally, though, the narrative flows along, on the back of detailed, precise observation of character, a gift for dialogue (even about quite banal subjects) and a capacity to turn up a new angle or two from which to peer at Adam and Neil.

That is enough to sustain a reader's interest, but certainly not enough to convert this story into Snowdrops II.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra reviewer.