Thirty-three-year-old Katie Kitamura writes about raging, ageing men better than most raging, ageing men do themselves. Like her debut, The Longshot  the story of a former martial arts star training for a comeback  the young Japanese-American writer's second novel is intimately concerned with the tail end of male lives that have been lived with brute force.

Gone to the Forest is set in a nameless country convulsing with the birth pangs of anti-colonial revolution. Having claimed a vast tract of land 40 years ago, one of the first white settlers is preparing to hand it down to his only son, Tom. Cold and domineering, the old man has made life-long fetishes of his power over the land and his power over women. After growing up "under the weight of this man", Tom is timid, unworldly and a disappointment to his father. Unconcerned with power, he loves the land of his birth innocently  love it is clear he would rather give the old man.

As the nationalist rebellion sweeps south towards their domain, a dark, dreamlike series of events unfolds that ruptures the old world order. The old man, still virile and acquisitive, beds the girl that he had arranged for his son to marry. But the girl is gang raped and  we later learn  impregnated by local white men. ("Men suited to this new age of violence.") Meanwhile, a nearby volcano erupts after centuries of slumber. The landscape is covered in ash, and the old man's lucrative fish farm is destroyed. Forced into appeasement measures won by the nationalists, the old man signs away most of his land.

Like Coetzee's Disgrace, Kitamura foregrounds (almost exclusively, it must be said) the consciousness of white colonials, as their once expansive world starts "shrinking to a piece of paper". The truly outstanding element is the old man's demise, which could almost be filleted out as a novella  a cold, powerful father dying under the tortured gaze of a bitter, unloved son.

Gone to the Forest is bold for many reasons: not only for the cultural, sexual, historical and national boundaries that Kitamura steps over to get into the minds of her characters. But also for the way she explores the cruelty of colonisation  whether it's of homelands, or of women's bodies  within a hauntingly beautiful, startlingly brief story of an old man dying.

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest. Tom, the naive son of a cold and controlling father, has spent his entire life on their remote estate, which relies on fish farming and tourism. Aggravating the filial tension, Carine, a young woman who is ward to neighbouring colonials, arrives at a dinner party, and her betrothal to Tom is quickly arranged. Tom fails to sexually certify the relationship, and "the old man", still virile, "beds the girl every night for the next three weeks". Carine moves into the house, adorning herself with the dead mother's jewellery.

Tom is not only an aspiring cuckold; he's also incapable of comprehending situations of complexity, whether psychological or societal. Where the father is master to seemingly loyal, though not apolitical "natives", his son exerts little authority. As the country grumbles towards civil war, the estate's inhabitants must also contend with a nearby volcanic explosion and subsequent ash storm, which devastates the farm's fish stock. On the night of the eruption, a less gentle dinner party is held. Carine, in an act of initial complicity, is raped by the male guests while father and son are indisposed. "It was going to happen anyway so she might as well be the one to do it. Not that she was fatalistic but the zipper slid down without protest and now the dress was hanging off her back."

The volcanic fallout constitutes the beginning of the father's demise. After near-asphyxiation in the ash cloud, he absconds to the city with Carine, leaving Tom in charge of a denuded estate, much of which has been signed away as part of impending land redistribution. Returning six months later, the father is mortally ill, and Carine is pregnant. By now, the region is riven and bloodsoaked, with rebel "oath-takers" decimating villages and perpetrating atrocities.

There is much to want to admire in this ambitious piece of fiction. Kitamura is keen to explore political transition and human cost. She is an apologist for neither colonialism nor revolution. As a fable, it has identifiable metaphors that are satisfying enough: the catalytic volcano stands for indigenous upheaval; the rape can be read as the struggle over and usurping of land; the father embodies a colonial era so neatly that rebels arrive at the farm's doorstep the morning he dies.

Kitamura's language is consistently spare and plain, a style that served well in her debut, The Longshot. In Gone to the Forest, it allows her to portray schematic character representatives and interactions; the tenor is dark, folktale reportage, with the slightly increased novelistic complications of gender, family and race. Customarily, much of the characterisation is told, rather than activated in scene; Tom is repeatedly referred to by name, Carine is mostly "the girl" and the father's name is unknown, as if to signify types.

Beyond this, the reticent non-description works against the project. The locale is lacking in texture and dimension. There is simply soil, pasture, grassland, a river. The author has tried to fashion a matrix of countries, a meta-setting  from which the reader might infer regions in India, Africa and South America  but in doing so she fails to evoke a realistic, albeit imagined, landscape or culture; she fails to create a specific identity and history. There are clues: large golden fish in the river called "dorado" (an oceanic species), current igneous activity, and impala: features which don't tally and instead topographically distort and wrong-foot the reader.

Similarly, the political unrest is underexplained, largely because Tom has no interest in it. "The new idea of the rebellion is making Tom unhinged. He rides the horse and his entrails thrash inside him. He does not even know what the rebellion means. And yet his vocabulary expands  The expansion is no good thing for Tom. He lives in a permanent state of contraction and the stretching is like to break him."

These fudging techniques seem a deliberate attempt to both atomise and unify, perhaps in an effort to consider a shared legacy of colonialism and the inaccuracy or incompleteness of historical narratives. Kitamura asks the reader to believe in an ersatz, even vague realm, which has little integrity. If a world fails to convince, no amount of internal drama or academic exercise can vitalise it.

The "dislocated" novel is one of the most difficult literary projects. Its dimensions, its peoples and its wars, must be superbly executed. While this novel goes partway to being a disturbing, intelligent vision of colonial tectonics, it remains an unrealised piece of fiction.

 Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference is published by Faber.