A Stolen Season: An unsettling triptych of ruined lives

Marianna Gluck, born in Germany, emigrated as a child to Australia. A dance teacher, she married one of her pupils, the embezzling impostor who calls himself Manfred Leber. Now she has taken flight, as improbably far away as Belize, to "the stern old city … built by British buccaneers to repel Cortes on his way through to Honduras". Her old life over, "a lost world of ancient ruins is in reach" – Mayan pyramids in the fringing jungle.

Finally, in the shortest section, Hall introduces John Philip Hardingham. Nearing 70, bolstered by "speculative investments in places as far apart as Archangel, Abu Dhabi and Adelaide", he mildly enjoys "a life of comfortable seclusion". An unexpected legacy in 2012 from a great uncle gives John Philip the chance to disrupt the complacencies of his family. The bequest is the only one remaining by J.W.H. Turner of "sketchbook after sketchbook of the most shameful sort – women's pudenda".

More often, Hall switches back to the story of Adam and Bridget in its muted emotional complexity. He loves her again but wants her to be able to leave; deeply disconcerted by his return, she finds reasons not to go. Bridget's lover, the genial narcissist Ryan Liddicoat, fronts a reality television program called I Survived.

Inevitably, he seeks an interview with Adam through Bridget's connivance, in which all scars will literally be exposed. There are frequent flashbacks to the Iraq War: invasion by the allies, lethal patrolling (Corporal Griffiths and Private Chris Fletcher, "a legend for his exceptional ferocity") and Adam's fateful "appointment in Samarra", from which his body has in some senses miraculously been rescued.

Hall's radicalism underscores this material: his belief that, fought on false premises, cover-up of the causes of its casualties is now primary government business.

A promoted Lieutenant Fletcher survives Iraq and reappears as the lover of the architect of the Turner gallery that Hardingham has her design in his Melbourne home. His family, with their "privilege-hardened, refined, intelligent, imperious faces", is invited from around the world. The viewing is all this solitary, disregarded man could have hoped for: "Glaring patriarchs tower to protect their womenfolk"; "old pampered faces harden with disgust and contempt".

That strand of Hall's novel seems over, as does the second account of Marianna on the sacrificial pyramid two days before – according to the Mayan calendar as opportunistically interpreted – is due to end. Each story has further connections to make, though, with the pain and subdued heroics of Aden's and Bridget's lives.

At one point we encounter the reflection "How little substance there is to the self", yet Hall's characters work strenuously to resist such summation. Out of a deep well of empathy, he draws them in their solitude. There is bitter satire in A Stolen Season as well, and it might be argued that the targets are predictable: conniving western governments both at war and then falsifying its record.

However, Hall's instincts are all with the victims – whether Iraqi women who pass a baby between them as death threatens, or a Chinese refugee making a life in suburban Australia with his daughter, or that strangely assorted quartet who give their names to the parts of this brilliant and unsettling late-period triumph by Hall.