I have enjoyed many of Alan Warner’s previous novels, so it gives me no pleasure to report that his new book is so monumentally tedious that when two accountants turn up halfway through you think: great! Things might finally be getting interesting.

Kitchenly 434, set in Thatcherite Britain, is narrated by Crofton Clark, an aging hippy who lives at Kitchenly Mill Race, a Tudorbethan pile belonging to the mainly absentee rock star Marko Morell.