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This is one of the most beautifully-presented works of fiction I’ve ever seen. It’s also really quite boring. I should add that I haven’t finished it, and I probably won’t. It has been sitting on my printer for weeks, mocking me. But I can’t go back to it! And that makes me sad.

Before I can explain why it makes me sad, my first sentence needs a little unpacking � and I mean that quite literally. The book itself is a hefty, weathered-looking hardback bearing the title ‘The Ship of Theseus� on its spine, along with a library’s Dewey Decimal sticker. The hardback comes inside an elegant slipcase of lightweight black cardboard which bears the title ’S�, and the names of Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams. It is all very handsome. And the book is actually secured within its black sleeve by a paper band which you need to cut away before you can take it out and open it. The reason for this soon becomes clear: as soon as you take the book out and start to leaf through the pages, some things fall out. And there are a lot of things in the pages.

There’s a postcard with some handwriting on the back. There’s a napkin with a map hastily scribbled on it. There are a number of letters. There’s a code wheel. There’s an extract from a college newspaper. And there are many, many more objects, all of which have been placed strategically throughout the book. While I don’t think you’d ever mistake one of them for the real thing, they are all really well produced: the paper napkin, for example, is printed on the exact kind of napkin paper you’d actually get in a coffee shop.

Anyway, now that you’ve got the book open, you can start actually reading it (which you probably weren’t able to do in the bookshop because it was sealed inside its black sleeve). You soon find that you are reading a book called ‘The Ship of Theseus� by a man called V. M. Straka. But you are also reading the footnotes by the person who translated this book. And in the margins, you are also reading the hand-written comments of two people: a young female student and an older male student. These two are in a kind of textual dialogue because in this world they are leaving the book around for the other to find in their college library. They bond over their shared love of this author, and so their writing is both a gloss on Straka and a sort of semi-flirtatious conversation about themselves. As with the items within, the comments are immaculately printed: they do look exactly like handwriting alongside the hard text of the actual novel. Whether the comments make for interesting reading is a different matter entirely.

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I really like novels which play with form in this way. I took the name for my blog from the technique of writing in the margins of a text. And I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on ‘Pale Fire� and ‘House of Leaves� because I love those books. I make a habit of seeking out stuff like this where I can because there aren’t very many around, so I bought this book knowing nothing at all about it or the author(s) or how it came to exist. I write this not because I think it makes me an authority, but because it makes me a potential fan. I was absolutely willing to entirely submerge myself in this fiction. I was hoping I’d be so swept up in it that I would come to believe all those things that fell from the pages were real enough to be worth caring about. All of this is stupid, I suppose, but that’s how I felt. And I was disappointed.

The essential problem is that the central work of fiction here (the actual novel ‘The Ship of Theseus�) doesn’t stand up to the kind of intense personal and investigative scrutiny that we are told it has. Here are all these people poring over this text in the margins, but the thing they are poring over is little more than a turgid mass of tropes from mid-c20th European fiction. It’s so wedded to the possibility of suggesting a grand conspiracy, so full of implied analogies and metaphorical readings, that it never actually goes anywhere remotely interesting as a story. How fun it would be if this were a playful gothic romp in the style of someone like Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I kept thinking; but it just never quite gets off the ground in the same way. And so all of the beautiful little things that fall from the pages lack any kind of narrative weight. They're just pleasant little garnishes to a main meal forever postponed.

‘Pale Fire� got around this problem by refusing to be drawn on whether its central subject actually had any literary merit whatsoever. That the bizarre commentary of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote makes the poem worth reading is part of the joke; and it’s one of the deepest and darkest jokes ever told in fiction. It may be unfair to compare this to what is (in my opinion) one of the finest novels ever written, but here the conceit is so similar that it practically invites it. But 'S', I’m afraid, comes nowhere near.