James Meek's latest novel is both a love story and a modern war travelogue.

Meek is an astute observer and often writes poetically. It is not difficult to feel for the protagonist, Adam Kellas. As his life descends slowly, like a plane in an emergency landing, we feel for him, yet it is also difficult not to laugh.

What I love about Meek's writing is how he switches seamlessly between lyricism, narration and description. He is even accurate about his characters' body language. And take this wonderful paragraph that encapsulates a correspondent's life:

“‘A country sends its travellers abroad like words spoken from one person to another,’ said Kellas. ‘Like me talking to you now. The country sees its travellers leave and I hear the words as they leave my mouth and enter you. But the country doesn’t see what happens to its traveller when he arrives in that foreign place and I can’t know how you take the words I speak.’”

or how he zooms into the moments Kellas may have fallen in love:

“She’d been strong for a skinny-armed, thin-shanked woman, the way she toted that rucksack. It would sit upright on the ground, sagging at the top, and she would bend at the waist to hoist it. Her wrists would poke out thin and white from the sleeves of her too-big anorak, her fringe would hang down and her jaw would come forward a little way. A sound would come from her lungs as she held the strap of the rucksack and took its weight and swung it onto her back. One time he had offered to help and she shook her head. She would notice him watching her. Sometimes she would smile and sometimes she would not, but she would never look him in the eyes until the rucksack was up on her back and the straps were tight. More than once in Afghanistan Kellas had caught himself thinking about the sound, the exhalation with voice, which came from her involuntarily as the weight pressed on her. He thought of the air in her breast, and the rush of it in her larynx, and the bones containing them, and the flesh around them. He’d recognised the things of which this tiny sound was the centre: a fascination. A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn’t enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him. He needed to be running two or three lives at once. Not even words had made the fascination, just the flex of her limbs and the tiny sound as she took the strain of her pack. Just those things had crossed into him, and faint as the chances were, he wanted to follow them back to their source.”

Although there were a slew of revelations towards the end, I couldn't help feeling depressed. I'm not sure why I'm not giving the book 5 stars - it's pretty damned good. If you pressed me, I'd give it 4.5, docking the remaining for the irritating Bastian bit which I thought was superflous - I didn't need to know his back story.

It's a quick read at 300 pages - I read it in less than 24 hours. I think it could make a splendid movie; indeed, it's listed in imdb.com as a project "under development" slated for 2012!