Wake Up Tim Pears Bloomsbury, 227pp, £16.99 ISBN 0747559570

This trim novel is a hybrid of commodity history, kid-lit and popular science, cut with some titillatingly taboo sex scenes and bound together by a thrillerish sense of doom. Its central theme is progress, but it turns on the image of a scientist/businessman driving round and round a ring road, caught on a tarmac Mobius strip somewhere in the Midlands.

John Sharpe is a middle-aged MD on his way to work at Spudnik, the international potato dealership that he and his elder brother, Greg, have built from the family market stall. John enjoys his job, but today he has some bad news to deliver: desperate to stay ahead, he has been developing edible vaccines, splicing together humble spud genes with the DNA of diseases. And now, in faraway Venezuela, human guinea pigs are dying.

Cocooned in his Mercedes, John overshoots his turn-off and allows himself one more lap of the ring road. And then another. And another . . . And while man and machine loop the town, John's mind forks off to sketch evocative vignettes of his life so far.

The Sharpe brothers grew up in a stationary mobile home with their parents - uncurious, unambitious folk - and their little sister, Melody, who against all the genetic odds blossomed into a Botticelli beauty. John is the brains to Greg's brawn, the clever kid who won a scholarship to Oxford, where he stared into test tubes and pint glasses for three years, only to be fobbed off with a 2:1, a snub that still rankles decades later.

We glimpse John's courtship of Lily, his bohemian wife, his devotion to their baby son, Jacob, and his evangelical belief in spuds. But his character soon becomes dappled by misogyny, misanthropy and a clutch of unsavoury vices as his descriptions of his son take on a disturbingly visceral edge: "When he smiles, my son, especially when he's clearly uncomfortable, it's heart-melting. The corporeal condition is such a restriction. Look at his cradle cap, his pulsing fontanelle. See the skin raw in the folds of flesh at his neck, armpit, knee."

Nor is John a very trustworthy narrator. Early on, he owns up to fake memories and a sly nature, and is forever doubling back on himself to make corrections, thwarting the narrative's natural development. But his belief in progress and growth is unshakeable, underpinned by a well-worn Darwinian rhetoric and an Eighties ruthlessness: "We're sovereign individuals. We talk different languages, even when we think we talk the same," he declares. It is surely no coincidence that John, like Margaret Thatcher, that other mildly crazed, megalomaniac Oxford scientist, is the scion of a greengrocer. And yet such is the speed of modern life, that growth is necessary just to stay still, and it's only when he's on the move, cruising in his car, that John is capable of reflection and able to keep at bay his fear that something is missing from the future.

From the corporate-sponsored school attended by John's nephews, where adverts are the new catechism, to the spooky holograms gathered round the table at Spudnik board meetings, this is a fable full of eerie futuristic detail, yet there is nothing here that does not already exist. The title stems from a phrase lobbed at John by Lily, "a line of hers that ends up just where it came from, an ambiguous spot midway between a partner's private joke and spousal putdown". Used in its entirety - "Oh wake up, man" - it indicates an underlying, apathetic bleakness. The world that Pears depicts is barely a heartbeat away, and it already seems too late for that wake-up call.

Pears reveals a queasy, Frankensteinian twist on the final page; although it is not as surprising as one might expect, the journey there makes bracing and refreshingly relevant reading.

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