Gun-toting rebels seize government buildings, take hostages and appear on state television to announce the overthrow of a "corrupt" regime. The army intervenes, and the insurgents become the heroes of the moment – or its cannon fodder. The BBC arrives. Welcome to the generic coup d'etat.
It's a familiar scenario, but not one often conveyed in literary fiction, which tends to shy away from getting down and dirty: the armed political uprising is more likely to form a narrative backdrop than sit centre stage – which adds to the already impressive heft and bite of Monique Roffey's vivid new novel.
House of Ashes charts the violent trajectory of an insurrection that loosely mirrors the failed 1990 coup in Roffey's native Trinidad, also the setting for her two previous novels, the lush, feted Archipelago and the Orange-shortlisted The White Woman on a Green Bicycle. But it is soon clear that its ambitions extend beyond the fictional reconstruction of historical events. For all its local colour and specificity, the narrative feels rooted in a now that could be any time, and a here that could be anywhere. And the fact that the action takes place in the House of Power in the City of Silk on the eternal-sounding island of Sans Amen speaks to the universality of Roffey's central theme: the moral grubbiness and chaotic logistics of the power-grab.
In lesser hands such an approach might yell "morality tale", but Roffey is too deft a writer to erect ethical signposts. If there is a lesson to be drawn, it is that in times of crisis, nobody and nothing can be taken at face value. From the moment the bookish, spiritually inclined rebel Ashes tells his wife the "small but necessary lie" that he will be back for dinner, we suspect that the uprising he has been guilt-tripped into joining is doomed. "Don't mess with the women of Sans Amen, everyone knew that." Ashes's deception will come to haunt him.
The House of Power is swiftly and bloodily occupied, but, just as fast, Ashes is out of his depth: when he is handed a gun that nobody has taught him to use, "he held it like he might hold a teapot". Tasked with guarding hostages – the wounded, diabetic prime minister among them – he watches events unfold with the eerie detachment of a television viewer, or takes refuge in the library to pray. His faith, elegantly and movingly portrayed as "the wingbeat thrum of a hummingbird, or a quiet, gentle feeling from outside passing in", provides a welcome escape from the brutal hostage standoff that soon becomes an imprisonment for all.
If Ashes has made a life-altering misjudgment, he is not alone. The appalling intimacy of hunger, heat, festering wounds and open defecation sparks conflicts – but it also forges unexpected understandings and liaisons. Struggling to defuse the volatility of the situation, the environment minister Aspasia focuses on the youngest rebel, Breeze, who has clearly found a father figure in the group's charismatic unnamed Leader. Can her one claim to political fame – the protection of the indigenous leatherback turtle – trump the sense of purpose, or the fire-power, that a manipulative guru can offer an illiterate teenager? It's a hopeless challenge. Aspasia realises that Breeze has probably never set eyes on a live turtle, and with terrible poignancy it emerges that he has no idea what an election or a prime minister is either: his Leader hasn't told him. But nor has a school. The failure is a shared one.
In the midst of an accelerated army bombardment, there are further reckonings as those who believed they were "players" realise the real game is happening elsewhere, and with different rules of engagement. This disjunction is highlighted by the cleaner, Mrs Gonzalez – the type you "don't mess with" – who escapes from the shelter of a cupboard to castigate the rebels: her refusal to be identified as oppressed, and her majestic rubbishing of the testosterone-fuelled "monkey-dance", add a comic note to a blood-soaked story packed with astute emotional observation.
By the time the emergency is over, the world's attention has already turned to a bigger and more dramatic attempted coup d'etat in Kuwait, and Kate Adie has moved on. But the aftershocks will continue to resonate in Sans Amen. Deploying the deep, humane wisdom that has become a hallmark of Roffey's increasingly sure writing, the novel delivers its final, bittersweet coup with a fearlessness and grace that richly satisfies.
• Liz Jensen's novel The Uninvited is published by Bloomsbury. To order House of Ashes for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
