Avante-garde in sunny Belgium

Despite the pitch-perfect facility for the sinister, which Michel Faber displayed with his first novel, Under the Skin, his short stories remain the most tantalising hint of a serious European writer in the making.

Published in 1998, under the title Some Rain Must Fall, they revealed in Faber a kind of virtuosity that can only come from the creepy talent of the true mimic. This wasn't the virtuosity of verbal ingenuity; it was the ability to write along an entire spectrum of styles - satirical, fabulist, lyric, comic - as if each represented the one authentic voice of the author.

In The Courage Consort, Faber turns to the novella, a form standing neatly halfway between those of his first two books. And, again, he shows that whichever way he wants to write he can do it just so. As if it weren't hard enough to make a novella feel worth the jacket price, he opts for a subject and a setting which should, by any normal account, make for reliable reader-repellent.

Yet this coolly rendered tale of an avant-garde classical music troupe preparing for a concert in the bland environs of the Belgian countryside is strangely moving.

For a start, Faber is one of Britain's very few unselfconsciously European novelists. His own background - a bit of Dutch, a bit of Scottish plus a fragrance of the antipodean - seems to allow him to move to odd places without fuss or knowing gestures. Here, he takes the reader on a trip to mini-Europe, in the company of neurotic oddball musicians, as if they were the most natural cause for our concern.

So we take Roger Courage and his consort seriously. The eventual resolution of his wife Catherine's dithering over her suicide makes for a quietly compelling undercurrent. And the fate of the massively obese baritone, Ben Lamb, whose "Achilles stomach" proves fatal to the troupe's Belgian concert, is an actual tear-jerker.

But, as always with Faber, there is a narrative detachment which suggests that some faintly supernatural laughter is tinkling away in the background of events. There's some cruelty in there, but far more delight.

And it comes from a writer who is only beginning to prove what he can do, who convincingly implies that he can manipulate any material into a tale, take you anywhere, however peculiar.