Mr Golightly's Holiday Salley Vickers Fourth Estate, 345pp, £16.99 ISBN 0007156472

This is one of those books whose central theme is difficult to discuss without giving the game away - perhaps it will suffice to say that it has a touch of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but if that turns out not to be enough, I shall go ahead and ruin it for you anyway.

The surface story concerns the eponymous chap, who journeys to Devon with a mind to updating a book he wrote many moons back. He believes its themes to be current, but thinks a new generation has been put off by the arcane language and character development. Vickers takes a bouncy and likeable tone with the characters of whom she is fond - of her hero she says, "Mr Golightly's was a nature adapted to finding pleasure wherever pleasure was honestly to be found", and it's hard not to be charmed by that kind of talk, even though it's slightly cloying. All the animals involved get a good press as well, which is nice. Where the characterisation falls down is with the bad guys - subtlety is a stranger to this author. If she wants to convey snobbery, she has the snob say: "Of course, he's very lower class." When dim-witted femininity is required, the narrator notes of the filly: "She didn't like to think of those men all shut away in that nasty cold prison with no one to give them a cuddle." From an author whom we know to be capable of giving her favourites three dimensions, the brittle idiocy of the walk-on characters is not just unconvincing, but also lazy. Naturally, where allegory is involved, an amount of caricature is a given; but caricatures still have to relate to evil as we know it, rather than as we wish it would behave.

There is also a failure to differentiate the characters by dialogue; some are silly, some vain, some straight-talking, some grieving, but their cadence and vocabulary are largely identical (except in the case of a young boy who speaks much like all the others, only he says "fuck" more often). The effect of this is to make the relationships between the players shallow - idiosyncratic speech is a major component of distinguishable self and, without it, they are left choosing one another as mates on the basis of an outfit, or expedience, or sudden moments of mystical "love". This last is profoundly irritating, since it affects to be a higher, near-divine state, but truthfully serves as a shortcut to unions that have no authenticity or resonance.

If the speech is bland and samey, that's not due to any lack of long words. I am not, by nature, anti-intellectual, but whenever I read the word "pellucid", I smell a thesaurus. Nobody in this book has a good memory, it's always "capacious" - and two separate capacious memories in five pages are at least one too many.

And I may as well spill it, our hero is, in fact, God. This is a discussion of good, evil and the human condition, and it features God as a well-meaning bloke with an eye for nice breasts. I don't know why this should be so irksome (it certainly isn't on the grounds of blasphemy); I suppose because for an exposition of love and frailty this basic, you really shouldn't need to draft in the big guys.

On the plus side, there was one laugh (page 119) and some exact descriptions of Devonshire birdlife. For people who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.

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