It takes a while to get the measure of Gordon Burn's second novel. Its set-up cajoles us into recognition, something to make us comfortable before letting us know we can divest ourselves of the rulebook. In Miller's stories we look for explanations, a revelation, but Burn is not in the business of whodunits. We expect Miller to regain his humanity, redemption through ferreting out McGovern's assailant, but two-thirds in and that strand is as good as abandoned. In place of villainy we find only the perverts, killers and other grotesques who prop up late twentieth century Britain. Fullalove is not so much a mystery as a state of the nation address - and if this is the state we find ourselves in, it's all hands to the lifeboats.

Burn uses Miller to get to the heart of the darkness. Here is a man without conscience or ethics, and so we are unencumbered by niceties like compassion or mercy. Burn's light is harsh and unforgiving. Meet 'Clit' Carson, advance guard dispatched by the paper to fuck his way into the families of perpetrator and victim alike. Or the man who found fame and an opening as a daytime quiz show host through the kidnapping of his young son from the family home. Or the smudger, veteran of Vietnam, who now decorates home with his snaps of amputees, skin disease, dead kids and the studies he made of his own wife's mastectomy scars.

But what use is just another novel about the gutters of the tabloid press? Through the horror (and there is plenty) we detect Burn's real agenda: disgust at the commodification of pain. Never has a novel cut quite so close to the bone in its decoding of the compassion industry - the drifts of flowers and soft toys left at murder sites, the inane cards smeared in easy platitudes, the rituals of communal grief that conform to a strictly defined decree of suffering. It is shocking because - as cases like the Wests or Dunblane prove - it is true. This is not a cathartic book. It exchanges humour for hurt.

It is also astonishingly well written; super-literate, like a funereal Will Self. And mercifully short, albeit dense and unremitting enough to panic the unwary inside just a few pages; a scabby but painstakingly honest howl of absolute rage. You come looking for release - Miller wonders if he is an observer, inured to misery or "an actual carrier, a cross-pollinator" - but in the ferocious, almost surreal ending find little succour.

Undoubtedly many will find Fullalove too demanding, too hopeless. And worse, to fight through Miller's unflinching streams of consciousness - the corpses and the sexual abuse - is to emerge with nothing sane to cling onto. Suddenly his infantile attachment to the puppy makes horrible, chilling sense.