Personality Andrew O'Hagan Faber and Faber, 327pp, 16.99 ISBN 0151010005

After a brief wartime prologue whose significance we are left to guess for a while, Andrew O'Hagan begins his story on the day of the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977. At Rothesay, on the Scottish island of Bute, two 13-year-old girls, both from immigrant backgrounds, take part in the fancy dress parade. Maria Tambini is Mary Queen of Scots and her best friend Kalpana Jagannadham is Queen Victoria.

Maria's mother, Rosa, runs a chip shop. Rosa is disappointed, self-pitying and cries all the time. "People seldom asked what was wrong . . . For all the years they'd known her she had been in a state of moderate distress." She hopes for vicarious fulfilment through Maria's singing talent. That evening, Maria sings at a concert in the Winter Gardens. "Nobody ever heard a little girl sing like that before . . . She gripped the microphone and swayed into every note . . . 'Oh my God,' said Miss Black from London."

Miss Black is a scout for the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Maria's uncle Alfredo, a hairdresser, has sent her a tape of Maria singing at full belt and persuaded her to come and check out "Rothesay's very own wee darlin 'starlin'".

Readers over 35 will soon realise that the novel is loosely based on the life of Lena Zavaroni, a diminutive Scots-Italian with a remarkably loud voice who shot to fame on Opportunity Knocks at an early age, had a couple of rather annoying hit records - "Ma! He's Making Eyes At Me" and "Personality" - and succumbed to an eating disorder in 1999.

The main storyline being thus largely predictable, O'Hagan diverts us instead with a wealth of incidental detail, some of it compelling, some of it less so. Hughie Green, the host of Opportunity Knocks, is given a chapter-long monologue to tell us about his life and times, including his service as a pilot. "Was I free up there? Or was there never a moment in my life when my nerves didn't scream out for the remedy of applause?"

O'Hagan boldly disregards Green's posthumous tabloid reputation as a two-faced philandering monster and shows him in a sympathetic light, even suggesting that his notorious catchphrase, "And I mean that most sincerely, folks", was in fact sincere.

The mock-transcripts of Maria's appearances on chat shows are well done, catching the different styles of Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Terry Wogan. There are nice cameos of Les Dawson and Dean Martin bantering kindly with Maria on- and off-stage. Flashbacks fill in some of Maria's family history. The central event is the death of Rosa's sister Sofia during the war, before Rosa was born. This is a powerful sequence, though it does tend to emphasise the novel's episodic, digressive, lumpy structure.

When Maria takes part in a royal variety performance at the London Palladium, O'Hagan puts on a virtuoso performance of his own, tracking Maria's progress across town to the theatre and giving vignettes of the life unfolding in the streets and buildings around her.

Later his travelling eye goes on an extraordinary ramble through subterranean London - "arches, corridors, greasy pipes . . . former shelters, night-gloop, the remnants of the Great Fire . . . Victorian whispers, telephone cables, a Saxon cross of powdered sandstone" - before taking a look around a Tube carriage and venturing up, through the tunnel roof, layers of soil, basement rooms and then the boards of the Palladium stage, to find Maria in the spotlight.

But we never know what it's like to be Maria. Perhaps this is deliberate: there is nothing to know because, as with many showbiz personalities (supposedly), she has no real inner existence. The stuff about anorexia and bulimia is cursory and book-learnt in feel; the acknowledgements include a textbook on the subject. Textbooks on extinct birds and the sugar industry are also mentioned, because Kalpana's well-read father likes to chat about such things.

Maria finds possible salvation in a slightly unconvincing affair with Michael, a bright Rothesay lad now working for a blind ex-servicemen's charity in London. The well-observed chapter about Michael's office colleagues and his dealings with the old soldiers is another digression. Still, if the novel were tidier it might be duller. And most of the time, O'Hagan's writing is exhibition-quality.

Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic

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