Lukewarm on the heels of the story

Fiction: Ka, a poet and political exile living in Frankfurt, returns to Turkey on a mission. He has a job, the investigation of a series of suicides taking place in Kars, an isolated city near the Armenian border.

As he sits on the old bus taking him there, we are informed of the significance of the glamorous coat he is wearing.

Right from the outset there is something slightly odd, almost half-hearted, about this novel. No one could appear less like a journalist hot on the heels of a suicide epidemic story. Ka's 12 years in Germany may have rendered him an exile, but Orhan Pamuk is not content to allow the reader to speculate. He steps right in and within a page is offering a rather thorough pen-portrait of a character he is presumably hoping will retain our interest for the next 435 pages. The real reason Ka has come to Turkey is to bury his mother. And oh yes, there is a girl. He was never involved with her, but now he knows he loves her.

Snow is a novel in which there is a great deal of talking and not very much said. It is a disappointment not only because it comes from the Orhan Pamuk who wrote The White Castle (1979), which impressed on the appearance of its English translation in 1990, The Black Book (1990, English translation 1994) and The New Life (1993, 1997), but especially because it comes from the author of a flamboyantly rich picaresque-thriller-cum-art-history tour de force, My Name is Red (1998, 2001), which won last year's Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award.

Always a metaphysical, determinedly intellectual writer, with echoes of Calvino, Borges and Paul Auster, Pamuk is also a daring voice combing subversion as well as an awareness of Turkey's extraordinary culture and the ongoing East-West, or Oriental-European, tensions that frustrate, confuse and intrigue all who explore them. This novel Snow is consistently at odds with its ambitions and achievement.

Apparently the source of much debate in Turkey, where it managed to outrage both Islamists and westernised Turks on its publication in 2002, it presents an unflattering, near-comic portrait of Kars as a place in which no one is all that sure of anything aside from the fact that several young girls have killed themselves. In tone, it is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's offbeat yarn The Unconsoled (1995). In common with that book it suffers from being very long, but whereas Ishiguro succeeded in making his novel's bizarre nature its ultimate strength, Pamuk's narrative merely emerges as longwinded and improvisational.

For all the sideswipes at the confused politics of several of the characters who are presented as revolutionaries but are in fact fanatics and failed lovers mainly at war with themselves, Pamuk has here missed an opportunity to consider the internal cultural confusions of a country that is as much torn between its notions of Europe and its place within that Europe, as Europe itself is confused about where exactly Turkey fits.

Snow is more than the title, it also describes a state of mind or, at least, the notion of perception as it exists within the book. Ka is a drifter whose politics are well overshadowed by his poetry and by his obsessional love for Ipek, a girl whose beauty is one of the major themes in the narrative. Once in Kars, Ka - whose name also means snow - begins writing poems with a frenzy akin to the way other people suffer panic attacks. The poems simply happen.

At no time does it seem that he will be writing any news story. For a western reader, there is something very confusing about this novel in that Pamuk himself does not seem to have any opinion regarding the Kurds or anything else. Belief is throughout treated as a common cold, merely a nuisance but not all that important. Elsewhere there is a throwaway remark when Blue, a revolutionary of sorts, remarks to Ka: "Contrary to what our own Europe-admiring atheists assume, all European intellectuals take their religion, and their crosses, very seriously. But when our guys return to Turkey, they never mention this . . ."

The same character later announces: "I refuse to be a European . . . I'm going to live out my own history and be no one but myself."

Some of the stilted exchanges are funny, as are the sexual digressions, if only because the entire novel is so odd. There are also a couple of almost comic sequences, such as when one young would-be revolutionary wants to tell Ka ,the poet, about the science fiction novel he wants to write. Ka, a Woody Allen without the wit, a study in dozy ambivalence, never engages the reader because he does not exist beyond Ipek's beauty.

One would wonder at Pamuk's intentions in this rambling, heavy-footed and slight-as-cake performance. He has populated Kars with a cast of misfits who spend their days watching television and the snow, who complain but will only undertake the craziest of projects, and who have somehow missed the point of both their country and their culture.

Snow, written in a heavy prose not helped by the preening authorial intrusions, is not only lacking Pamuk's proven metaphysical intelligence and imagination, it is also without his sense of direction, or conviction.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times