Casa Rossa, by Francesca Marciano

Last year I sent a copy of Francesca Marciano's spanking debut novel to a friend covering the Afghan conflict. Rules of the Wild dissected the journalistic scrum following horrific central African conflicts, anatomising the febrile characters shuttling to and from violence and the claustrophobic relationships that passed for civilised life in Nairobi.

Marciano had lived for most of a decade in East Africa, and she successfully grafted war journalism's fevered lifestyle with the exuberant beauty of that continent. Casa Rossa sees a return to home turf for Marciano. She has moved back to Rome as a screenwriter, where she grew up in a film-connected family; and the novel consciously explores three generations of a family (congruent with her own) in the context of Italy's recent history.

Alina recalls her family past while packing up Casa Rossa, a resplendent restored farmhouse rising from the olive groves of Puglia in Italy's heel. Her grandfather Lorenzo had bought it in the Twenties, bringing Renée, his Tunisian wife, and daughter Alba each summer – until Renée eloped with a German aristocrat. Lorenzo took this badly but, by implying that Renée was a spy, managed to foist on her much of his own guilt at informing on anti-Fascists during the Thirties.

No wonder Alba turned out somewhat derelict as a mother: she rowed with her raffish scriptwriter husband, Oliveiro, and remained selfishly inattentive to her daughters Alina and Isabella. In turn, Isabella's childhood moodiness matures into rebellion: domestic anger, sex, drugs and, finally, terrorism during the Red Brigade insurgencies of the 1970s. Alina escapes for a calmer affair with Daniel Moore, a reassuring art critic in New York, but returns to support Isabella during her murder trial.

Problems beset this well-paced but congested plot. Alina's memoir "is about what gets lost on the way", but, narrating with hindsight, she simply imagines encounters for which she has no substance. Marciano's exciting theme – how families or nations can reiterate falsehoods until they become accepted as truths – is undermined by this whimsical structure. The tendency to state plot developments as faits accomplis, rather than showing how relationships bloom or sour or warp, further diminishes the architecture of Casa Rossa .

The family's camouflaged collusion with Fascism balances well against Isabella's defiantly public link to Red Brigade atrocities. But many characters grope for the true meanings behind their actions without exhibiting the degree of introspection or raw emotion that charged Rules of the Wild. In using material adjacent to her own family circumstances, I feel that Marciano has overlooked the essential details that eloquently primed the astringent characters of her debut.

Part of my disappointment lies in knowing just how well Marciano can write, yet finding only a few brilliances here. Perhaps, unusually, another hundred or so pages would have grounded her characters. Intriguing ideas wait for convincing voices (how does moral truth differ from literal truth?) but Casa Rossa never quite attacks a culture at the roots of its self-belief. By stating a case for her characters, rather than showing evidence, Marciano leaves them curiously unprotected.