Any Human Heart William Boyd Hamish Hamilton, 504pp, £17.99 ISBN 024114177X

There was a fashion in the 1980s for novels that told the story of the 20th century through the mouthpiece of an unusual and elderly character: history via the detour of biography. I have always suspected that the fashion had more to do with the success of the film The Tin Drum than any literary considerations: the Eighties were a shallow decade, after all, full of admen and hucksters. But two novels stood out: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, still my favourite British novel, and William Boyd's excellent The New Confessions, the intimate confession of an elderly film director.

This is why I am so perplexed by Boyd's new novel, Any Human Heart, the intimate journal of an elderly author. It puts me in mind of Marx's saying about history repeating itself as farce. I greatly respect Boyd, so my hand hovered over the keypad before I began this review: should I be charitable or should I be decisive? Because this novel strikes me as an extremely poor piece of work.

Fortunately, I have the chance to be both. A friend has just sent me his own babbling and praise-laden review of the same novel. And so, just as a novel about a novelist allows the author to reflect on the business of novel writing, I can use this other review to reflect on my own difficulties of criticising a writer I had expected to eulogise. My friend believes that novelists should never shy away from writing novels about novelists - after all, he argues, they have a specialist knowledge of a profession that few people will ever know. And while he admits that most novelists lead boring lives, he points out that the hero of Any Human Heart gets to meet famous writers, works as a spy and later joins a British offshoot of the German Red Army Faction. He also argues that the structure of the novel - an intermittent diary - allows Boyd to spice up the action. Whenever things drag, he can use a jump-cut to kill his hero's wife, or enrol him in the Baader-Meinhoff.

In truth, Any Human Heart drags worse than the dame in an amateur pantomime. And the device of randomly changing the setting or killing the characters only underlines how dull the book is.

The hero, Logan Mountstuart, publishes three acclaimed books while still in his twenties, one of them a bestselling novel. Thereafter, he survives on journalism and, for a while, as an art dealer in New York. Facing the threat of a statutory rape charge in the early Sixties, he flees to Africa, where he teaches. After his retirement, he is so poor that he is reduced to eating dog food and selling newspapers for a radical left group, a job that leads him into a plot to smuggle dynamite into Britain for a terrorist campaign.

There is an inescapable randomness to all these events. One could argue that Boyd is underlining the Brownian motion within all our lives, while suggesting that the transcendental value of a life is not these bare events, but the mystery (the stuff inside any human heart). Like, yeah - but any random boring book could argue this. There needs to be a governing principle within the text, even if it is only a principle that governs randomness. There needs to be something like a literary equivalent of the theory of Brownian motion underpinning the action.

The pleasure of novels during a time of the dominance of cinema is the digression into the random. But the narrative should possess a logic that allows for the generation of these digressions. This is what Any Human Heart lacks. If it is governed by any principle, it is that of an anthology: a pick-and-mix of celebrities (Edward VIII, Ian Fleming, Picasso) and a scrapbook of locations (Oxford, Bahamas, New York). There is one big event: Logan returns from the war to find his house legally owned by strangers and his wife and child dead. But this brief, chilling event is not elevated to a principle that could shed light on the entire narrative.

My friend, the happy babbling reviewer, disagrees. He finds almost endless fun in the ups and downs of Logan Mountstuart. So perhaps I am wrong. Jacques Derrida once made a pun on "ontology" and "anthology", a genuine pun in French. Perhaps this is what I have failed to understand about Boyd's novel, the playful elision from one form, the genuine novel, into another, the occasional book.

Nicholas Blincoe's latest novel is White Mice (Sceptre, £10.99)

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