Films are too long. This is a fact. There was a time (it was the 70s) when to push at the mystical two hours barrier meant that you were SERIOUS ART. Junk cinema came in at the nice, tight hour-thirty; serious work - or that damn foreign stuff - was all that went through one-twenty minutes, and then only by fractions. That way you saw the length and knew what to expect. Now that doesn't happen. Now everything has to make a stab at two hours, and even the most vacuous action vehicle (something which has coincidentally grown up in the meantime) romps home at 140 minutes. It's all too much. And much the same could be said of books. Too often the sheer size of a book is used to equate it with some kind of worth. Where two hundred pages would have done, now every damn thing has to weigh several pounds to even get noticed. Everything has to be a trilogy or a saga or A Suitable Boy. And there are only so many What A Carve Up!s in a given year.

Which brings us to journalist and author Geoff Dyer. The first thing you notice about The Search are its modest proportions. This is a small novel. Maybe it's small enough to qualify as a novella, whatever that is. In it a man called Walker meets a woman called Rachel at a party. She asks him to do a job for her: to find her ex-husband Malory, who has disappeared, and get him to sign some documents. Walker, as intrigued by the woman as by the job, accepts and treks off after the mysterious man (of whom he has no picture) as he travels through a string of beautiful and increasingly bizarre cities.

The first twenty or so pages of this book could easily fool you into thinking you had its measure. There's nothing unusual there - a man, a woman, a sexual fascination, a job. But as Walker's voyage begins it becomes more and more obvious that this world isn't quite all we thought. This is Kafka country. Your next stop, The Twilight Zone.

There's a city in which time appears frozen, its inhabitants all in mid-action (one actually falling from the church tower). Another - notably Despond - that holds visitors in its melancholic vice-like grip, empowering them to leave before robbing them of the will. Another is completely deserted, allowing Walker, like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, to free-shop at his leisure. Yet another is actually a palatial country house (Last Year At Marienbad anyone?) empty of humanity, whose corridors form roads and where every room is an antechamber.

Dyer's style in all this is extraordinarily simple but never prosaic. His descriptions of these places are curt, factual, the machinations of Walker's search, the thoughts in his head, all noted with elegant simplicity. The author's technique is as in-keeping with his subject as it is with the novel's over all economy.

The result is a book that is exceptionally easy to read and yet one that casts memorable images, hooks of ideas into the mind. Which makes the end all the more disappointing. Dyer struggles ultimately to resolve his search, to resolve the occasionally violent pursuit of Walker through this landscape by the enigmatic Carver. He does, but it's almost inevitable that whatever else happens, the finale is always going to be somehow less than that what went before. The Search proves beyond question the dictum that it is all too often better to travel in hope than it is to arrive.