Reviewing someone's first novel, it is customary to be polite about it, to find things to praise in it. So let me say straight away that James Thackara's The Book Of Kings is printed on very nice paper, and the typeface is clear and readable. And, given that it's 773 pages long, the author has shown a commendable degree of application and spent a great deal of time on the project.

That, as it turns out, is the literary-London story of the book; that he's been writing it for years and years. This, we were promised, was going to be the great novel of the European experience, covering continents in its magisterial stride. Now, at last, here it is, and we can judge for ourselves.

And it's terrible. Startlingly badly written, with no apparent understanding of what drives people or how people relate or talk to each other, it is a book of gigantic, hopeless awfulness. You read it to a constant, internal muttering of "Oh -God - Thackara - please, don't - no - oh, God, just listen to this rubbish". It's so awful, it's not even funny. There is not one decent sentence in the book, nothing but falsity and a useless sincerity. It may be the very worst novel I have read.

The scene is Paris in 1932. Thunder clouds are gathering over Europe, but what care our four gay students? They will go and drink and eat and be merry at Polidor's! Ah, Polidor's, where you can buy, er, fish from the jolly old patronne - "' La-Bas, mes beaux garçons, mes anges ; sit down, eat a good dinner!' she shouted, with the discernment of old women for young men." Meanwhile things are getting grim in Germany.

Soon the time will come for our four students to part. David Sunda, Johannes Godard, Duncan Penn and Justin Lothaire; each comes from a different part of the world. History will treat some of them roughly, of that you may be sure! And some will survive the coming catastrophe, and some, mes braves , will triumph over the savage wavelets of History. (Thackara's style, distressingly, is rather contagious.) And the result is the usual stuff, the tragedy of Germany, the tragedy of Europe, friends sundered by the movements of History, and a book as thick as your wrist.

What sets Thackara apart is quite a simple fact. He can't write. After a while, the incredulous reader starts to play a game: to open the book at random and try and find a tolerable sentence. Save your effort - you will never win. Thackara is always ahead of you, with his uncanny knack for the not-quite-right word and the yer-what turn of phrase. "You could not see his parents' intricate cultivation, nor that the ball was in the Palazzo Farnese, just after the war." "Justin's friend was not in the courtyard, but the fountain was." "The Hanoverian battery commander, Egbert, was as delighted as a music conductor to show off for his guests behind the embankment wall." These examples are taken entirely at random. It is all at least as bad as this, and some of it is worse to an unspeakable degree.

Terrible as Thackara's prose is, it becomes quite unremarkable when set next to his idea of dialogue. "David . . . what about kindness and children, what about right and wrong? Also love. What about love?" "Isn't the power and its refinement here?" "The struggle there, Eli, is for the soil of my fathers." Every single character talks in exactly the same idiotically macaronic way, and 500 pages into it, you are still trying to remember which humourless pundit is which. The women sound like the men. The men sound like nothing on earth. And not one of them has a single thing to say other than how the Tragedy of History is progressing.

The awful thing is that Thackara really wants to say something. He is utterly sincere, and will probably be admired by people who believe that sincerity, rather than art, is the basis of a great novel. He is probably a nice man. He obviously cares deeply about these great historical movements and has done a great deal of research - my God, he has researched and researched and researched. But on the evidence of The Book Of Kings, he could not write "Bum" on a wall. The Observer