Salamander Thomas Wharton Flamingo, 368pp, 15.99 ISBN 0007128649

What exactly characterises a successful magic-realist novel? All such work contains depictions of lush, exotic landscapes, describes the extraordinary adventures of a quirky protagonist, plays around with historical facts and evokes the atmosphere of a fable or fairy tale. For all their fabulous events, the best novels of what is now a tired genre, such as Gabriel GarcIa Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, are rooted in recognisable, realistic landscapes. Marquez's descriptions of South America and Rushdie's of India are so convincing that the reader is willing to accept the extravagant plot lines. These authors persuade you that such bizarre but believable landscapes might indeed breed fabulous events. The descriptions of landscape are like the roots and trunk of a large tree, and the numerous stories that inhabit these novels are the branches, the natural offshoots of the tree.

Magic realism is also, at its best, a rebarbative response to previous fictions about the same locale. One Hundred Years of Solitude confronts and debunks many of the colonialist myths about South America that were perpetuated by Joseph Conrad in Nostromo. Midnight's Children similarly responds to the coy, civilised world of E M Forster's Passage to India by blowing a big literary raspberry in its face. Unfortunately Thomas Wharton, in his new "magic-realist" novel, does not have the luxury of responding to familiar, past fictions, because he has chosen, as his setting, 18th-century Hungary. Not even those most familiar with Hungarian literature could cite many novels that explore this period. The inter- textuality that makes the best magic-realist novels so engagingly rebellious is lost here, as Wharton struggles to establish a credible "exotic" landscape.

The plot line is, in itself, not original: an eccentric, malicious Hungarian count invites a famous English printer, Nicholas Flood, to his castle and orders him to produce an "infinite" book. Employing a somewhat tired Borgesian trope, Wharton makes the castle a conundrum of revolving doors and moving floors, but never really offers the reader an interesting riddle. Flood finds redemption in the arms of the count's strange but desirable daughter, Irena. When their romance is discovered, Flood is imprisoned and left to languish there for ten years. He is eventually released by his daughter, whom he had no idea existed. Together, they set off on the count's bizarre ship on a round-the-world romp in search of Irena. Their travels take them to Venice, Alexandria, China, South Africa and eventually to London.

When the characters start rushing hectically around the world - as they also did in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which begins with such a convincing portrayal of London - it is a sure sign that a magic-realist novel has failed. The melodramatic events, the chunks of badly digested travel writing, blight Wharton's novel in much the same way as they did Carter's superior work. The final, London-based section is perhaps the most engaging because Wharton, at last, offers a realistic and convincing depiction of place; his evocation of London is not bad.

It's a shame that Salamander is such a disappointment, because Wharton's first novel, Icefields, was so promising. It succeeded because the whole thematic and imagistic structure grew out of one specific place - the town of Jasper in the Canadian Rockies, where Wharton grew up. He would do well to return there for his next fictional outing.

Francis Gilbert is a writer and teacher

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