I wonder what response there would have been had Harper Lee written a second novel. Would the grace and simple brilliance of To Kill A Mockingbird have hampered the success of anything further. What else could live up to that high standard? Or perhaps the driving success of her first novel would carry her second along. But such suggestions are merely speculative. She never wrote another book.

A writer’s second novel can be a troublesome and vexing creation, particularly if it follows a notable and loved work. It is most problematic in terms of reviews and criticisms. David Guterson’s latest novel, East of the Mountains, according to most critics, has not soared to the lofty summits of his first triumph, Snow Falling on Cedars. Consequently many reviewers have focused their remarks on a comparison between the two works. This misses the point and does not give sufficient credit to the work. And needless to say Guterson has not been impressed.

His latest novel is a story of redemption.

Ben Givens is 73. His wife Rachel, the love of his life has died. He has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. A former doctor and heart surgeon, he is all too familiar with the impending symptoms of his disease. For him there seems to be only one reasonable option. Death.

He knew exactly what to expect and could not turn away from meeting. After the bedsores and bone fractures, the bacterial infection from the catheter, the fluid accumulating between his viscera that would have to be expunged through a drainage tube; after the copious vomiting, the dehydration and lassitude, the cracked lips, dry mouth, tube feedings, and short breath, the dysphagia, pneumonia, and feverishness, the baldness and the endgame sensation of strangling; after he had shrunk to eighty-five pounds and was gasping his last in a nursing-home bed - only at that point would Bill Ward put him down under a drip of death-inducing morphine. That was how his life would end if he did not end it first.

Ben embarks on a solitary hunting trip. Accompanied only by his dogs, Tristan and Rex, he loads up his 1969 Scout and heads off planning an elaborate suicide that will be recognised as such only by his doctor. But early in the trip, things begin to go awry. Still determined to follow his plan, he is forced into a different journey - east of the mountains. At points on it he meets a variety of people on whom he makes an impact.

In between the steps of his new trip are reminiscences into his past - growing up, falling in love, fighting in war. Guterson is a master at recreating the past. His writing is at its most lyrical when he transports his characters and his readers into the past.

He writes of Ben and Rachel’s love with a spare ease. Their romance blooms among blossoming fruit and is consummated in heartache - a wartime marriage. Guterson writes of war with a bleak urgency. There’s little glory paraded on his pages. He focuses on the insanity of war for the soldier: the madness of killing, the heart-stopping terror of being killed. Seen through Ben’s eyes, war is a strange coagulation of somnolent confusion and rapidfire fighting.

They stepped over bodies, some of them from the Second of the 85th, others in German uniforms, but there was no time to ponder the nature of the wounds or how the dead had met their ends, since more 88s were raining in. Some men clung to the shell-pocked ground, others scrabbled on their hands and knees to dig into the hillside. Ben moved unthinkingly, because other men were moving. He ascended a ridge but at its crest was met by machine-gun fire. A radioman sprawled beside Ben to report their position through his headset but received only static for his efforts and swore incessantly, the side of his face against the earth. More 88s slammed in at their left, canceling out all sound. Ben, in a pause, set up his BAR and began to fire at nothing in particular…

In a novel that so openly deals with death and life, spirituality and the divine cannot but be significant elements of the narrative. Guterson’s own perspective on belief is unclear, as is the view of his chief character.

The biology of the body, which he’d confronted everyday, had not in the least taught Dr Givens to disbelieve in God. On the contrary, he had seen that the body was divine, and he had witnessed the ceasing of its processes often enough to know that something holy left the body at the very moment of death.

Guterson’s depiction of Christian faith is realised most clearly in Ben’s mother. Described as a “dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian” she lectures Ben on elements of the Christian faith and reinforces the sovereignty of God. But there’s little talk of salvation. Guterson’s God is a distant, hard deity, all but absent in the face of suffering. At one point Ben picks up a Bible. But he turns not to a comfort passage or Scriptures revealing God in human form, but to Job.

Days of affliction have taken hold upon me.
In the night my bones are pierced and fall from me,
And my sinews take no rest.
By the great force of my disease is my garment disfigured;
It bindeth me about as the collar of my coat.
He hath cast me into the mire,
And I am become like dust and ashes.

It struck him how Satan and God conversed with such indifference and arrogance about their experiment. It was disturbing, too, that God punished Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite - all come to comfort Job - simply for misunderstanding Him in the course of delivering comfort.

Job’s suffering is a motif for Ben’s. But while Job loses all he has, family, possessions and his health, Ben’s loss is gradual and less devastating. For Job the issue was whether he would curse God for the sudden tragedies. For Ben it is whether he will take his own life.

David Guterson is prodigous storyteller. He words his pages sparsely, evoking emotions economically.

Ben mistrusted his memories. Everything in memory achieved a truth that was only a brand of falsehood. He remembered what was beautiful - a torture unto itself, really - while all else receded and blurred, dwindled into insignificance. It pained him to think that with his death the narrative of his time with Rachel would disappear, the story of their love expire. He could not explain it to anyone. It would leave the earth when he did.

Guterson writes grief well. He is able to weave a sort of eloquent beauty into suffering. The very humanness of loving and losing, the bittersweet sense of being parted from a soulmate is captured on the pages of East of the Mountains.

While Snow Falling on Cedars was an immense story, weaving together many strands, East of the Mountains is a shorter simpler tale. It’s simplicity makes it no less rich in the writing and no less rewarding in the reading.