It's a long shaggy dog story, detailed with various degrees of priapic and scatological intent, concerned among other things with (Rowson's list): "Enlightenment views of obstetrics, the theory and practice of 18th century siege warfare, Locke's philosophical musings on the association of ideas, grief, religion, the Law, trousers, sash windows, sentimentality, noses and whether or not the narrator's Uncle Toby had his bollocks blown off at the siege of Namur in 1695". And all this largely before the narrator is even born.

Tristram Shandy was never finished. How could it be, given the density of Sterne's digressions and philosophical musings? Episodically published, it made him famous in ways that seem scarcely credible today, and remains arguably the first postmodern novel, albeit seen from a pre-modern perspective. Thus it remains perfect fodder for that most disparaged form, the graphic novel - and hence Martin Rowson's three year toil.

Rowson's immediately recognisable work appears regularly in The Guardian, Time Out and The Observer, and as sometime collaborator with author Will Self (most recently, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis). Books, including Scenes From The Lives of the Great Socialists and a similarly graphic take on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, are less well read. His style here is no less discursive than that of his chosen source, inserting himself as second narrator to Shandy, commenting and disassembling Sterne as much as his book. And lest that sound too imperious, he's accompanied on his Gilliamatic journey by a pugnacious talking dog called Pete. Together they become animated footnotes to both the original text and Rowson's deconstruction.

And rest assured, it is heavily deconstructed: at one point a gaggle of Gallic acrobats swing in to dismember our heroes in a suitably Derridian fashion. Sterne's typographical pranks, like blacking whole pages, are shifted over for Rowson's action to, quite literally, run into. Halfway in and we run through a cinema screening Oliver Stone's Shandy ("Toby! Ya ma bruddah!") and on to an end where we get Martin Amis, American Psycho and Shandian cyberspace (a Sterneist block of 1's and 0's). There is something fitting in it all ending up in a BBC frown'n'gown epic.

Rowson - part Robert Crumb, part Beano - gets to play graphically fast and loose, cutting in pastiches of, among others, Constable, Joseph Wright of Derby, Hogarth and Beardsley. As a graphic novel it's still hampered by the need to repeat vast acres of spoon-bendingly unintelligible dialogue from the original, but has the distinct advantage that, when the going gets tough, there are plenty of terrific pictures to keep us amused. Sterne would doubtless approve. Highly recommended.