"Not weird. This is the same Kofi Coker who is my father, too. This is why I have an English name like you. You are my brother."

With the same inexorable logic that drives contemporary no-talent Brit movie-makers ("film" -- too limp-wristed) towards a hundredweight Lock, Stock retreads (logic: shit sells), then greed-eyed novelists now bend a nose eastwards to sniff-up the major chance. A rupturing Russia and its environs; chips off the old Bloc. Shake your Unique Selling Point (Mike Phillips is, ah, black) and press 'ON'.

Not that I'm marking Phillips a chancer; he's criminal establishment. In the dreadfully literal A Shadow of Myself, a black documentarian called Joseph Coker, in Prague for a film-festival, meets George Coker. Brought up in East Germany. They share the same Ghanaian father, he claims. Cue political moves, paradigm shifts East-West, Third World pressure sores.

There's admirable ambition to Phillips' sixth novel, but a soon-established dread inevitably settles over such careful writing. It was as true of earlies like Blood Rights and The Late Candidate as this: prose just too cautious, too brown rice. You admire the skill but hanker after something altogether more reckless.

Of course, he backed a loser in the off -- it takes a genius like Kieslowski and a film like Three Colours White to properly nail the preening New Capitalist bunny to the tree. Proficient without ever being passionate, A Shadow of Myself slips down without ever troubling the sides.