I can only imagine that the editor who described this book as being 'as intense and submerging as rain' was being a bit too clever for their own good, because it really is about as immersive as a light shower. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't enjoy it much either. The writing is fine, but there were no parts I felt like marking out as especially significant or beautiful. And that's the problem; the whole book is dominated by this odd sense of flatness that make it quite dull to read.

The novel revolves around the life of Augustin, a boy who is born deaf in early twentieth-century Romania, not long before the Second World War. He lives with a relatively wealthy family in a big country house, but his inability to hear means that he is sidelined, partly by accident and partly by design: he never learns to talk, to read or write, or to communicate in any definable way. But he does learn to draw, and though he never really becomes known as an artist, his drawings and little sculptures become a way of understanding the experiences of his past through work in the present.

All of this is fine as a conceit. But never once did I feel like Augustin had the kind of special kind of artistic insight that the book insists he must have. Too often the author takes an overly literal approach to his art; he's plonked down in a location, there's a couple of paragraphs of pretty but workmanlike description of what he drew, and we're expected to extrapolate from this...what? That art is good and here are some things that are beautiful and this poor boy who cannot hear and the bad soviets want to repress him but he understands -- what? What? It's just not enough.

And this same weird sense of insufficiency extends to pretty much everything else about the book. The other characters are hardly there; Adriana and Safta are basically interchangeable; nobody changes, nobody develops; the whole book is plagued by a peculiarly English sense of paralysis (and not in a good way). It's a pre-war country house novel transplanted to a guidebook version of foreign climes. You never get the sense of this book truly existing in Romanian culture, and if I wanted to be really cruel I'd go so far as to suggest that Augustin's deafness is an excuse for the author not to involve themselves with that, preferring instead just to look on and describe another silent sequence of pleasant farmyards and/or horrible concentration camps. Such is light and shade in modern literature.

It's the third book I've read as part of my attempt to read the shortlist for the 2012 Orange Prize, and it was easily the most disappointing so far; I didn't like 'The Song of Achilles' much, but at least it had a rollicking plot and might be pleasing to fans of the genre. But this is just hopelessly dull. It's tempting to see its nomination as another result of a compromise decision between the judges: it's a not-unpleasant book, and will probably do well as an unchallenging and somewhat anaemic read for the poolside this summer, but it's surely nothing like the best book published in the last year.