BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Political Intrigue Takes a Personal Spin : JUBILEE <i> by Robert McCrum</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $22, 225 pages

One of the amusements of “Memories of the Ford Administration,” John Updike’s 1992 novel, is the way in which two undistinguished U.S. Presidents--Gerald Ford and James Buchanan--were used as foils for the exploration of a professional historian’s tumultuous life.

The conflict and machinations of the political world mirrored, to a large degree, the more sophisticated schemes of everyday existence; and what proves overridingly important isn’t military might and political shrewdness, but the basic problems and passions of existence, the simple humanity that even the rich and powerful can’t escape.

British novelist Robert McCrum is up to similar things in “Jubilee,” a fiction in which the ineffectual President’s role is played by Jimmy Carter--here often called, incongruously, the Old Man.

McCrum’s protagonist is quite unlike Updike’s scholarly Alfred Clayton, however, for Sam Gilchrist, a 36-year-old, half-English MBA-holding speech writer is more trendy than tweedy and holds suitably mass-market ambitions--he aims, post-White House, to write not a life of James Buchanan but an implausibly high-tone Hollywood screenplay, “Shakespeare in Love.”

That work lies in abeyance, though, while Gilchrist composes an apologia, which in Gilchrist’s case is also an attempt to free an acquaintance from a fabricated murder charge. To Gilchrist the tale-telling is a “narrative cure,” an exorcism of personal devils, and for him it seems effective . . . though the same cannot be said, unfortunately, of “Jubilee” itself.

Why do so many writers feel the need to inject thriller-genre elements into works conceived, apparently, as literary? The killing (of a bookseller, strangely) that sets the story of “Jubilee” in motion is patently a plot device intended to force Gilchrist to trace a mysterious political conspiracy to his high-ranking father, Admiral Sir Ronald Lefevre. The accused killer likewise exists primarily to advance the story--Craig Marshall playing the good soldier framed by higher-ups for attempting to thwart the conspiracy.

One hates to question an established writer’s narrative choices--this is McCrum’s fifth novel--but “Jubilee’s” overall effect is significantly undermined by the melodrama surrounding Marshall’s role.

The central theme of the novel is betrayal--of women by men, of sons by fathers, of subordinates by superiors--but McCrum paints the personal treacheries so much more vividly than the political that the latter seem like afterthoughts.

The disjointedness of Gilchrist’s narration doesn’t help matters: McCrum bounces back and forth in time, and withholds information in order to pique reader interest and create climactic portents, but the result, more often than not, is confusion. “Jubilee” works best, it turns out, when McCrum covers Updike’s territory:

Gilchrist’s affair with the Australian journalist Ruth, who is clearly too independent for him; the telephonic relationship with Lizzie, Gilchrist’s resentful ex-wife; his inevitable deflation before his father, who reeks of unquestioned, unlimited authority; his half-bemused, half-amused recollections of youthful power--in retrospect, only arrogance--when Gilchrist could blithely say his boss was the President.

Uncoupled from baffling tales of murder and conspiracy, these scenes and subjects have energy and interest, and one wishes McCrum hadn’t tried to shoehorn them into a thriller-espionage framework.

It requires great skill to fuse political and personal intrigues into the sort of sophisticated page-turners Graham Greene called “entertainments,” and that skill is only intermittently present here.