Set in Romania during the second world war and its aftermath, Georgina Harding's third novel (longlisted for the Orange prize) follows Augustin, a villager who leaves a prison camp in search of Safta, the woman he grew up with on the manor where his mother was a cook until the Soviets shot her dead. His intention, revealed at length, is somehow to bring Safta tragic news of her lover, Andrei – "somehow", because Augustin is deaf, mute and illiterate.

The choice of setting and hero poses two problems, one of which – how to portray history as experience – Harding deals with well. She plunges us into the period with no unsubtle prompting. How closely the novel adopts a local perspective may be gauged from the absence of the word "Romania", save for when a foreigner (Safta's English governess) looks at a map.

But Harding ducks the bigger challenge: the puzzle of how to depict the inner life of someone who exists without speech or letters. She doesn't explore the narrative implications of Augustin's wordlessness so much as exploit them for the purpose of exposition. Either his fellow characters confide in him – safe in the knowledge that, like a priest, he'll neither judge nor broadcast their affairs – or they ignore him, allowing him to observe them unremarked, like a narrator.

The interest lies largely in the steady trickle of backstory that the opening pages leave out, yet passages written from Augustin's point of view end up having to relate things said to him – things he can't have heard.

It's odd that none of this troubles the novel, since Harding has obviously given thought to questions of form. At one point, Safta struggles to read Madame Bovary (1857), not because it's in French (she's fluent), but because of "all that it is concerned with". It lies unthumbed on her lap as she becomes absorbed by a wartime tableau that Augustin sketches beside her – abstract black rectangles on a road full of carts laden with furniture and livestock.

The suggestion is that modern horrors have rendered 19th-century culture irrelevant, not just because of its preoccupations (adultery) but because of its aesthetic (the well-made novel). Yet Painter of Silence raises this thought only to ignore it. Moving as the novel is, it might have stirred minds as well as hearts had it risked letting its protagonist's lack of language disrupt its own well-made surface.