Pushers, pimps, vandals, DJs, bikers, fetishists, boxers, thieves, travellers, former working class heroes, that classic oxymoron the white supremacist, and, worst of all, teachers. There will always be an England. Journalist and novelist Nik Cohn's ventures into this vale of Albion find a country ill at ease with itself. He calls it The Republic, a place of contrasts and horrors and privations and precious little optimism: "We're not so much Down and Out in Paris and London, more fucked up in Liskeard and Saltash."

Cohn's purpose, so far as can be divined, is to address the bizarre and trivial in his path and to distil this miasma of disparate thought and action; a definition of The Republic. The book takes the form of a series of interviews with those he and his travelling companion happen across. She's an angry, half-sketched woman called Mary who "asks me no questions. She doesn't bother to enquire when the journey starts, where it might be headed. Just turns up the soles of her DMs and give them a sharp rap. 'Lead on, big lad,' she says."

Their journey starts and ends, somewhat inevitably, in London, with its riot police and its football hooligans and its dank pubs and the thick crust of porn-sweat that hangs over that which isn't Rock Circus and neon tourist-flash. It wants to scout the present and bounce back on the past - Keeler and Johnny Edge and that threadbare open-cast shtick - but Lights Out For The Territory it ain't. Cohn records, he doesn't reflect. His Great City on the Thames has no lungs.

Much as the remainder - the bulk - of Yes We Have No (good title, great design), lacks reason as much as it gorges detail. It's almost as though Cohn has cruised Central Casting: "I'll have one of those, a clutch of them." So that, when the Orange Order marches - the Glorious Twelfth, bang! bang! - and Cohn catches "one Asian youth, in maximum boots and a plastic bowler," it's just not anachronistic enough. And that's when you start to recognise this Republic: these people don't know one another, no common ideology floods these mongrel veins beyond a simple stake on this recondite isle. We come expecting the decayed Last of England and find it sitting up in bed, tutting over The Sun. That's not Cohn's fault, of course, but if his Republic draws a bead - if it aspires to goals - then its author is playing the cards too close to his chest.

Yes We Have No was written in part for The Guardian and Sunday Times and reads like it. Capsuled in easily digested columns, then it begins to sing with an uneasy music. As extended reportage, Cohn's lack of authorial voice plays its part; it's Freak of The Week, and the unquestioning acceptance of the crap thrown his way makes a sort of tomorrow's-chip-paper sense. But between stiff covers and call it a book and suddenly you demand someone impose a stamp. "Reading changes everything," someone tells him. Not this book it doesn't.