THE best passages in Chris Menon's print-on-demand novel Diary of a Ghost are fast, loose and funny, says Jon Cheetham. Taken as a whole, Menon's work is as uneven as you might expect from a narrative mixing an 18th century pirate ghost with a 21st century global conspiracy, soft-core porn and musings on reincarnation.

If you can swallow the opening where the ghost in the Soho cafe recalls his salty tales of hardship on the seven seas, the reader is rewarded. The conspiracy unfolds, centring on the kaftan-wearing villain Shri Dooli Baba.

It is a massive gamble setting up your story with a device as musty as the ghost, Lawrence Durrell.

A talking apparition is so anachronistic there is a risk it is never going to deliver more than pastiche, making the author's endeavour to characterise the ghost almost redundant.

Durrell starts out shocking the narrator out of his pornographic reveries about the Latino waitress in the cafe and ends up his spiritual guide on a journey of purification and redemption.

This fast-moving, outlandishly implausible narrative flits through history and around the world and even ponders the mysteries of the universe.

Menon's writing is sharpest when narrator, Tony, a world-weary hack, is indulging his baser instincts. The sex is seedy, the action hysterical, the poetry awful and the metaphysics are certifiable. This is the point with books like this - enjoy it for some funny moments and take the rest with a pinch of salt.

Buy Diary of a Ghost at lulu.com