The real trouble with Hari

This book has been primed by its publishers as the outstanding debut novel of the year, which is merely to say that it has an outstanding marketing campaign behind it.

Hari Kunzru shares, with his friend Zadie Smith, an editor at Penguin - Simon Prosser - whose heated promotional style hangs around the neck of this book like either a charm or a millstone. My guess would be that being packaged as an "epochal" debut counts as a millstone.

Not that Hari Kunzru himself would stoop to any such queasy hyperbole. It's clear why his editors are excited about him. He is certainly a hyperbolic writer, but one whose language is so fresh and clean that you almost forgive him the baroque excesses of his story.

Kunzru's protagonist, Pran Nath, is conceived amid a violent monsoon in a cave in India at the beginning of the 20th century. His English father dies, swept away by a flood, immediately after a bout of primitive, anonymous rutting.

Having lost her virginity so wildly, Pran's mother marries a tame court pleader in (I think, though Kunzru's geographical details are often vague) the Punjab. She dies horribly in childbirth. Then, Pran's father discovers he has been deceived, and also dies - in a bath full of onions. Pran is cast out among beggars. So, auspiciously, begins a picaresque narrative of cross-dressing, buggery, Empire, and a half-caste's quest for Englishness.

There is writing here of real power and originality. "Like having a fallen log hammered up one's backside with a mallet," says Kunzru of Pran's rape by an overweight English major. Every lurid, unbelievable, ghastly event is rendered in this vein of unblinking clarity. Kunzru's is a pastiche of British imperial history, but it is one that nevertheless conveys an authentic feeling for the contrasting textures of India and England (though less so of Africa, where the story ends).

There's a good argument that this is the kind of thing British fiction does best, finding its most original contemporary voices in historical material. It was Matthew Kneale's Whitbreadwinning English Passengers which most recently told us who we are now by telling us who we once were. The shame is that so few novelists can pull off material of such power in the present.

With The Impressionist, we're in a world of hysterical historical magical realism that summons into itself the spectres of Rushdie and M?rquez, along with the multi-connectedness of big-scale American fiction of the Don DeLillo type. It is, on the one hand, hugely impressive. On the other, it seems inflated and empty - talent stretching itself too far.

The point about Pran, which Kunzru emphasises relentlessly as his character mutates from little prince to little pauper, from harem ladyboy to English public schoolboy, is that he is a cypher for identity, a white half-caste in search of a skin that fits: "He hints at transparency, as if on the other side, on the inside, there is something to be discovered." Pran (or "Pretty Bobby" as he is at this point) is held up as the ultimate chameleon, reflecting the changing meanings of skin colour in the 20th century. "Bobby's skin is not a boundary between things, but the thing itself, a screen on which certain effects take place." The difficulty Kunzru fails to overcome in his first novel is to make the reader care about someone who exists only so faintly. Other characters elicit much better writing from their author than Pran.

In Bombay, Pran is taken in by a Scottish missionary and his wife. The background story of Andrew and Elspeth Macfarlane is the most convincing section of the book. Their tragedy produces a compression and urgency of storytelling which is absent elsewhere.