Mitchell’s novel has no plot. If novel is what it is. Really it’s eight substantial short stories strung on a wire, each touching on the others, however tangentially. There’s art fraud in St. Petersburg, Russian gangsters, theft and death. In Japan one of those reasonable for the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway is on the run. In London a young man - a musician and, ah, a ghost-writer himself - assesses his life over the course of a day. On and on.

The problem is that, for all the fireworks, Mitchell’s both trying too hard and not nearly hard enough. His book has both too much structure in its disparate tales and too little actual connection over all. He expects us to do too much of his work for him while he busies himself with that irritant so beloved of the culturally aware contemporary writer, New Science. (Co-accused: Ian McEwan, mad Jeanette Winterson, Amis.) The results are hit and miss. The gangsters are okay, the London section really rather good, but travelling through the mind of a body-hopping spirit in Mongolia is as tedious as the earlier tea shack in revolutionary China.

Mitchell cannot decide whether he wants to be Nick Hornby (a slight Japanese jazz store love story) or Don DeLillo. Except, he’s clearly in thrall to DeLillo, borrowing his sense of fate and grandeur from the masterly Underworld and his would-be neck-hair teasing paranoia from the remainder of the American maverick’s astonishing oeuvre. All power to him then for choosing at least one hero from the right side of the tracks, but sometimes imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Literary ambition on this scale is admirable, and, who knows, maybe one day David Mitchell will live up to it.