Grand ambitions and a hint of trash

Many famous authors have done some unusual jobs early on in their careers, but a glance at Michel Faber's CV should still raise the most jaded of eyebrows.

According to the potted biography provided by his publishers, he has "worked as a nurse, a pickle-packer, a cleaner, and a guinea pig for medical research". Born in the Netherlands, Faber moved to Australia at the age of seven, where he lived until relocating to the Scottish Highlands in 1992.

Apparently, he has been writing for more than 20 years, although the fruits of these labours have only recently begun to surface. So far, we've had a short-story collection, Some Rain Must Fall, and a novel, Under the Skin.

While the dazzling range of narrative voices in the stories almost seemed to some critics like the work of 15 different writers, the novel was an odd, gruesome fable about an alien in female form who cruised the A9 in a Toyota Corolla picking up well-built hitch-hikers.

Now there's also this slim novella, which, as Faber tells us in his acknowledgements, was originally conceived as a short story based on an English Heritage dig in Whitby, but ended up swelling in length. The narrative centres around a thirtysomething archaeology student, S?an, who works each day on a project in the ruins of Whitby Abbey. Stopping halfway on the 199 steps leading up to the abbey one morning, she meets Mack, a young doctor from London who has recently come up to Yorkshire following his father's death.

Nothing much happens initially, although Faber creates suspense from the outset by plunging us deep into S?an's peculiar consciousness. He charts her appallingly vivid, regular nightmares, and lets his eerie descriptions of Whitby do the rest of the work. Soon, though, Mack shows S?an a bottle that once belonged to his father, containing the faded deathbed confession of one Thomas Peirson, dating back to 1788. As S?an painstakingly works on unravelling the parchment night by night, a classic murder mystery is under way.

Like Under the Skin, which was graced with an essentially ludicrous, but compulsive plot that could have been lifted from any run-of-the-mill science-fiction yarn, this novella uses the page-turning dynamics of genre fiction as a basis, and then transcends them. All the clunky descriptive furniture of a spooky ghost story is correct and present here, although the more hammy props - kitsch posters of vampires and Christopher Lee's cape - are referenced with a knowing, mischievous wink. Faber wants to have it both ways, and largely succeeds.

Despite such frequent nods to trashy bargain-basement fare, the main themes woven into the story are surprisingly grand and ambitious. With impressive subtlety and economy, Faber raises questions about the spiritual redundancy of contemporary life, the way in which the past haunts the present, and the invisible undercurrents lying beneath even the most humdrum human relations.

This little book may be dismayingly small - a mere 122 pages - but there's a potentially huge talent at work here.

(Canongate, £9.99)