We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, by James Meek. 302pp, Canongate Books, £16.99

I've they gave me this book to review because it's partially set in the part of northern Afganistan where the international hackery gathered to cover the ousting of the Taliban from Kabul. I was one of those who duly gathered and recall James Meek there, filing for the Guardian as he then was.

He does a very good job of takingthe reader into how it was for those of us suddenly living around Jabal-os-Saraj with frankly, not much in the way of warfare to cover.

Equally, the final chapter which sees Adam Kellas, the journalist whose beginning his descent, outside Basrah also powerfully recalls another siege-like period of dust, waiting and more dust.

The problem in all this and in the swirl through pretentious London dinner parties to alcoholic alienation in the swamps of eastern USA is Adam Kellas.

I'm loathe to criticise. I mean I have never written a novel - my work's strictly been non-fiction and I'm not sure I have one in me or know how to get it out, if it's even there.

But my difficulty was with Adam Kellas. I just didn't care. I kept thinking that I should, that I should worry. That I should be taken into him and his journey. But I never left the platform.

For much of this tale I couldn't quite work out why. But in the end the weakness is that, for all the time and words lavished on Kellas and his nightmare loss of grip on his own life, almost the more that's written the less I felt I knew him. Or cared to know him.

Which is odd. Since many characters who glance across his downward trajectory are particularly well observed - like Bastian, with whom Kellas eventually washes up in his destructive pathway to the ever-elusive Astrid. You really know Bastian within pages of meeting him. Kellas continues to slip through your grasp. And ultimately, to engage, you have to care.

Which a shame since so much of the writing's so powerful in its sparse style - "...Kellas found he wasn't brave enough to be thought a coward." Or "The flat was a declaration of the need for order made at well above the conversational level." These kind of gems stud the narrative from beginning to end.

And he does this across entire scenes - like the brilliantly realised coffee stop Kellas makes in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere in America, and comes across Renee.

The problem, though, is one of consistency, and for every instance of the above there are passages where the writing's laboured beyond measure, where the dialogue simply doesn't work. Where Kellas says to Astrid for instance: "A country sends its travellers abroad like words spoken from one person to another." Does anybody actually speak like this, ever? I think not.

For me this stylistic shift between terse, evocative writing which bowls the story along - like when Kellas singlehandedly destroys the dinner party - really engage you. But you might well turn a page and he's gone right off the boil. You sense Meek's at his very best when he seems to forget he's WRITING A NOVEL.

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