The opening stretch of Adam Thorpe's 12th work of fiction sends several literary ghosts scampering out from their hidey-holes. One is Thorpe's own debut, Ulverton (1992), to the fictitious Wessex village of whose title the hero of this book periodically returns. There the resemblances end, for Flight, sharply written and full of the most beguiling sky-surfer jargon ("boredom tube" for long-haul flight), is a study in realignment, retribution and regret.

A well-preserved and proudly uxurious family man  until the moment he catches his wife having tantric sex with her masseur  Bob Winrush has, by his own admission, done certain things he deplores during his busy career as a "freight dog". They include the transportation of cluster bombs, napalm canisters and assorted tiger parts for the oriental market. The dodgiest job of all, alas, now come back to haunt him, was one he walked out of halfway through: a commission to fly arms to the Taliban, with a drugs package apparently booked for the flight home.

All this took place two years ago. Coming back to his bolt hole in Dubai, Winrush discovers that someone has begun to piece these threads together. Summary sacking from the current day job is followed by a burgled apartment and a visit from three burly frighteners who stop narrowly short of pitching him over the balcony. Meanwhile, the lefty Israeli journalist to whom he has granted an interview winds up dead outside a Polish armaments factory. Back home in England, scarcely a week passes without another person connected with the flight handing in his boarding pass. A conference with the only other survivor, flight engineer McAllister  himself about to skedaddle to the safety of the Virgin Islands  yields up an invitation to stay in the latter's croft on the remote Scottish island of Scourlay.

If the first half of Flight is taken up with moving about, often at high speed (Winrush manages to get out of his sabotaged car just before it explodes), the second is about staying put. Kitted out with a new identity and a great deal of weather-resistant clothing, Bob reckons to pass himself off as a vacationing birdwatcher. Cover blown by the inquisitive locals, three sources of love interest (café owner, woman next door and skinny-dipping conservationist) promisingly in view, he settles down to some paranoiac brooding, revolver permanently to hand, eyes primed for a stir of movement on the surrounding hills. While the brooding turns up a hint that the suspiciously well-heeled McAllister may have more to do with the affair than he lets on, the eventual visitation takes a wholly unexpected shape.

There never was a novel about an airline pilot yet in which the figurative language didn't bear some relation to its hero's professional life. Sure enough, Thorpe can't resist the temptation to have Bob declare that "I was fitted with four engines. Marriage, home, job, kids. I've lost three. I'm gliding on one," or have him feeling "like an obsolescent aircraft left out in all weathers", when it is the author doing the feeling rather than his creation. In mitigation, Bob manages to display both a life of his own and a nice line in wisecracking shrewdness. The novel's most convincing exchanges  Bob bantering with McAllister, or prising information out of his disapproving activist son  grow out of psychological tension, half-jokey compromises reached by people who dare not reveal all they know.

As for the overall effect, an enterprising blurb-writer has marked this down as "a page-turning thriller and a masterful work of literary fiction". Harmonising these two genres was never going to be easy, and a fair amount of the proceedings can't quite disguise the fact that Thorpe is more interested in his characters' inner lives than bombs going off. But the eerily anonymous Dubai apartment block and the rain-swept Scourlay heather are beautifully evoked, and confirm a long-held impression that Thorpe is one of the most underrated writers on the planet.

 DJ Taylor's Secondhand Daylight is published by Corsair