The Mulberry Empire Philip Hensher Flamingo, 538pp, £17.99 ISBN 0007112262

The blurb is slightly misleading. "In the spring of 1839, the forces of the British empire, the greatest army the world has ever seen, entered Afghanistan in splendour. Three years later, a single horseman returns." For one thing, it was quite a small army, as Britain's armies have usually been. For another, the event that is described, the disastrous First Afghan War, happens only towards the end of this hefty work, which is mainly concerned with the build-up and various incidental doings.

Alexander Burnes, the first British emissary to Kabul, approaches the palace for an audience with the amir, Dost Mohammed, and somehow detects that "no cushion-fleshed tyrant in a pile of rubies sat up there, watching them approach; just a mind". Meanwhile, the amir's "marvellous mind" is reasoning that "the heavy useful English, having guns and money and land, could help the amir to stay just as he was". Oh, and he's also deciding to have his 12-year-old daughter-in-law chucked down the well for adultery.

Burnes and the amir hold long conversations about science, commerce and agriculture, and become friends. Unfortunately, the amir then entertains a Russian delegate as well, so he can't be considered reliable in the terms required by London. When Burnes gets home, it becomes more noticeable that the novel is an extended pastiche of the literary styles of the 19th century. Bella, the heiress who catches Burnes's eye, lives in a house in Hanover Square. The house is "so exactly what one would have expected, Bella thought, that none of her family or her family's friends could ever be said to have set eyes on it" - a passable shot at the school-of-Jane-Austen manner. The courtship of Burnes and Bella consists of trading quips, the "raillery" that was obligatory in romantic fiction back then. Bella even suggests that Burnes should try his hand at a novel, "sending Arabella and Rudolpho through three misunderstandings and the trial of a false suitor before reuniting them in the last pages of the third volume".

Stokes, a bohemian magazine editor on the same party circuit, is writing a parody about "Lady Belinda, the independent-minded chatelaine of Marplot Manor" and "Arian Callipie-Goss, the humorously wide-bottomed hero who would carry the bitch off at last". Philip Hensher's own tricksy ploy is to send the historical figure of Burnes back to India after a moment of passion that leaves the fictitious Bella pregnant. On the ship, Burnes writes very long letters to Bella (which are quoted in full), then throws them away.

In Thackerayish vein, Hensher writes: "The scholarly reader will be wondering what, precisely, was going on." He explains that a clique of bigwigs called Barling, Carling, Darling, Farling, Garling, Harling and Marling has persuaded the government to overthrow the amir: a senseless decision, because the amir has by now rebuffed the Russian delegate, causing the poor chap's professional and social ruin, which is recounted at length in the style of Turgenev: "On 23 September 183-, by the side of the road not many versts from the Crimean town of -, a gentleman of respectable demeanour but clad in a decidedly rusty black coat and breeches, no longer of middle age, was pacing up and down" (and so on).

All this finely wrought artifice keeps the reader at a distance. The officers of the army slogging up through the Khyber Pass talk like silly-ass chaps out of Surtees, just to remind you that the novel is merely a conventional form, not a world you can enter. To make absolutely certain of the alienation effect, an anachronistic jet plane appears overhead. Burnes, seeing the vapour trail, is baffled, but Hensher tells us categorically that there's a jet up there.

Stokes, in the meantime, has become editor of "the thundering paper", dropped his bohemian writer friends for high society and started spending too much. In this, he seems to be modelled on the real Times editor Thomas Barnes. He takes an interest in Bella, but it's only a mildly compelling digression while we wait for the inevitable massacre of the column in Afghanistan. Hensher has successfully emulated the roominess of the 19th-century novel, but has not filled the space with enough imaginative conviction. Wit and elegance by themselves, even in plenty, won't do it.

Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic

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