WHEN CHARLES FRAZIER was writing Thirteen Moons he must have been under intense pressure: not only did his debut, the American Civil War epic Cold Mountain, sell more than four million copies but this novel’s single-page synopsis netted an $8.25 million (£4.3 million) advance.

Given the difficulties associated with second novels, you might be forgiven for anticipating critical Schadenfreude. Like its predecessor, the book is set in Frazier’s native Blue Ridge Mountains, in North Carolina, where he used to find “arrowheads in cornfields as a kid”.

The novels have common themes (the capriciousness of life and people, the resilience of love, despite separation) and share nostalgia for a simpler past. But the tone of Thirteen Moons is a radical departure. It is the early 1900s and the narrator Will Cooper, a “resolutely antique” former senator, Civil War colonel and “white chief of the Indians”, gazes from his porch at what was once Cherokee country, gun by his side.

When not taking futile pot shots at passing trains, he thinks about his lost love Claire, reads Arthurian legends and struggles with modern technology (the phonograph and telephone). The story he tells us is based on his “memories from deep into the last century”.

At the age of 12 the orphaned Will is sold into indentured labour by his ruthless uncle and packed off to manage a remote trading post. On the way he falls in with Featherstone, an “enlightened” mixed-blood Indian, who has built himself a grand Plantation house inside the Cherokee Nation. Featherstone becomes one of Will’s two father figures.

During his teens, Will pursues Featherstone’s daughter, Claire, whom he recognises as “something fatal, piercing”, learns traditional Indian ways from a clan chief named Bear and sets himself up as a lawyer. Bear adopts Will and sends him to Washington (then not much more than a building site) to fight the clan’s case against forcible eviction.

When the US Army drives out the Cherokee Nation, Bear’s clan is spared because of Will’s complex land deals (which take full advantage of America’s regard for the “sanctity of property ownership”). But Claire and Featherstone choose exile. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Will has been elected to the Senate and during the conflict manages to keep himself and his Indian legion out of most of the fighting. Afterwards, his amatory and business fortunes prove decidedly mixed, as “year by year the world darkens”.

What distinguishes the tone of Thirteen Moons from Cold Mountain is not simply its subject but its first-person narrator. Scenes that appear to echo its predecessor, such as one describing a Cherokee ball game, illustrate this. In Cold Mountain the omniscient storyteller gave us a meticulously constructed overview: the game was placed in its geographical and social context, the layout of the pitch and the potential for grievous injury noted. Things going on at the edges of the game were given equal prominence: gambling, players nursing their wounds, drinking bouts.

In Thirteen Moons the precise location is unclear and Will lands the reader in the thick of the “great confusing huddle of men” (“run for your life”, “scratch like a woman”) with all its chaotic “whooped war cries”, bloody aggression and hilarity.

The pattern for Cold Mountain was Homer’s Odyssey, the story of a battle-weary soldier making a journey back to his beloved, facing life-or-death adventures along the way. Its scope was epic and its extraordinary power derived from the often unyielding, pitiless detachment of the narrator.

The models for Thirteen Moons are the romantic stories that Will loves: the Morte d’Arthur and Walter Scott (Will’s horse is called Waverley). The texture is far lighter (there is a great deal about young love and much less brutal violence). There is more comedy too, used to point up the charms and flaws of the narrator, the Americans and the Indians alike.

Which is not to say that the trenchant historical analysis, vivid descriptions of nature and the wealth of cultural details that were such features of Cold Mountain are absent. These are filtered, however, through the lens of Will’s personality and his changing view of life as he ages. The tensions between the mixed-blood, more Americanised Indians, and the full-blood Cherokees, caused by their differing opinions about the Nation’s future, are particularly well brought out.

Thirteen Moons is not the modern classic that Cold Mountain was. But it is a more than creditable second novel. Its narrative has a thoroughly human scale and informs just as much as it moves and entertains.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy