A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan – review

William Heming, the narrator of Phil Hogan's hugely engrossing fourth novel, is outwardly a model of plodding respectability. He runs a firm of estate agents in a leafy commuter town. He's mild-mannered, amiable, somewhat pedantic. Yet what no one has any inkling of is what he gets up to behind closed doors. In particular, the closed doors to other people's houses.

Of course, scoping out properties is what estate agents do. The job entails being at least a bit of a nosy parker. But Heming carries this tendency to wild extremes. On a wall in his flat hang the keys to every property he has ever handled. (He heads straight for the cutting shop whenever a new one comes on his books.) He refers to this gleaming tapestry as his "map" and he likes to gaze at it lovingly, contemplating the wonders it gives him access to.

Heming can't really be classed as a Peeping Tom. Cheap thrills aren't what interest him. His objectives are more rarefied – or so he imagines. He's a connoisseur of people's private lives, an artist, almost, of the domestic sphere. Typically, he'll familiarise himself with a "subject's" routine and then, when he knows the coast is clear, will slip into their house or flat. There he'll immerse himself in whatever he finds: bank statements, wardrobes, the contents of fridges. He'll take photos, videos. As he puts it: "Among strangers' belongings is where I am most at home…I know where they keep their private things, how they arrange their lives. I follow their plans and make mine around them." He almost makes such behaviour sound appealing.

To begin with, it's hard to know what to make of Heming. How seriously should we take him? His activities, though illegal, seem more odd than malicious, and it's easy to dismiss him as a harmless eccentric. Certainly, this is a view that he himself wants to propagate. He calls his snooping "an obsessive sport" and presents himself as a hidden force for good, a benign protector watching over his fellow townsfolk. Like some Neighbourhood Watch superhero, he stages civic-minded interventions – righting a wrong here, punishing a misdemeanour there. A man whose dog fouls the pavements later discovers a turd on his carpet; a pensioner's clipped wing mirror is mysteriously replaced.

Yet increasingly, the facts point to a reality that is considerably less comforting. As our knowledge of Heming grows, so our doubts about him intensify. In fragmented flashbacks, he recounts his childhood – and what these sections reveal (or appear to reveal) is truly horrific. There's a growing disjuncture between the voice speaking to us and what we know, objectively, to be the case. Meanwhile, the town's placid routines are disrupted by murky goings-on. What are they precisely and where does Heming fit in? The answers, predictably, only add to the creepiness.

There's real skill in the way that Hogan – a writer for this paper – pieces this unsettling story together. Its success depends on an intricate combination of things: the gradual drip-feed of information; the meticulous unfurling of a complicated plot; and, above all, the plausibility of its main character. Hogan's ventriloquising of Heming is impressive. He captures perfectly his mix of rationality and madness – the sense of logical means applied to deranged ends. The result is that we sympathise with Heming, embrace his plight – which only heightens our discomfort.

Yet there's another reason, perhaps, why Hogan wants us to identify with his protagonist. Despite his oddness, he has rather a lot in common with the person who created him. Isn't novel-writing, after all, a kind of snooping too? Don't writers have to immerse themselves in people's private affairs? A Pleasure and a Calling, though primarily a thriller, offers its own oblique commentary on the novelist's art.