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This is a novel -- is it a novel? If it is a novel it has no plot and no developed characters. The time scale is so huge as to be unimaginable (Stapledon's imagination is also unimaginable). The narrator starts as 'I', then turns into 'we', sometimes 'human', then a cosmic consciousness; and at one point something like (but not exactly) a demi-god. Oh weird, this is so weird. This might be the weirdest book I have ever read.

How is it compelling with no plot? How can you care what happens next when the main character is no more than a point of view? How do you centre yourself in the book when it zooms from world to world, galaxy to galaxy, aeon to aeon? I don't know. But somehow you do.

The narrator does starts as a human being. I think the first sentence is completely wonderful: "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill." On the hill, he looks at the stars and then suddenly he finds himself "soaring away from [his] native planet at incredible speed. . . I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and a delightful effervescence of thought." And so it goes on, like an astonishing, amazing dream.

The narrator encounters many forms of life, many different kinds of intelligence. On some of these, he dwells for a paragraph or two in fabulous detail. For example, I loved this bit: "Many of these early universes were non-spatial, though none the less physical. And of these non-spatial universes not a few were of the 'musical' type in which space was strangely represented by a dimension corresponding to musical pitch, and capacious with myriads of tonal differences. The creatures appeared to one another as complex patterns and rhythms of tonal characters. They could move their tonal bodies in the dimension of pitch, and sometimes in other dimensions, humanly inconceivable. A creature's body was a more or less constant tonal pattern, with much the same degree of flexibility and minor changefulness as a human body. Also, it could traverse other living bodies in the pitch dimension much as wave-trains on a pond may cross one another." It's like David Attenborough on speed.

I said there was no normal plot to draw you through and connect things. There is, however, a question. The narrator starts by staring at the stars, into which he is drawn in a kind of dream or vision. I think it is a vision. I totally believed in it. Not believed that it was true - I don't mean that - believed that the vision was a genuine experience. I still feel quite sure Olaf Stapledon did all this in his own head, was somehow drawn into it inexorably and as a visionary, not as an ordinary writer. Oh -- I forgot the question. It is 'Who, or what, is the Star Marker?' The narrator goes in search of God.

I loved the complex experience of finding the Star Maker. Yes, he does find him. But no spoilers here! He finds both an answer and no answer, the only kind of resolution I could be happy with. This is too truthful a book to come to a conclusion anything less than profound.

In some ways, I think the book is about size. It encompasses a vast time scale. In fact, it goes right outside of time. And distances inconceivable. But it looks the other way too, at the microscopic. There's a Note on Magnitude at the end, where the author says "Immensity is not in itself a good thing." Somehow this book is both immense and only 253 pages long.

On the front cover, there's a quote from Arthur C Clarke. I'm normally allergic to blurb, but - well - Clarke says: "Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written." I'd go with that.