Better luck next time

<i>The Stars' Tennis Balls </i>by Stephen Fry (Hutchinson, &pound;16.99, 371pp)

What, my little periwinkles, my young crocii, do we have here? Has dear old Stephen Fry been taking the sneakiest of peeps inside the Jeffrey Archer Bumper Book of Plots? I very much fear he has.

What, my little periwinkles, my young crocii, do we have here? Has dear old Stephen Fry been taking the sneakiest of peeps inside the Jeffrey Archer Bumper Book of Plots? I very much fear he has.

We have young Ned, Neddy, Nedward, the most popular boy in school, in a terrible fix. Charming Ned, soon to be head boy of Harrow, has silky, floppy upper-class hair, is a brilliant athlete and born leader.

Not surprisingly, he has an enemy: horrible, lower-middle-class Ashley Barson-Garland. Ashley is swarthy with coarse hair and is much cleverer than Ned. He keeps a diary full of bitter, unconvincing, entries about his loathing of his background. He comes from a world where people use fish-knives, put doilies on plates and call pudding dessert. All terribly non-U.

Now, you might give all this some credence if Fry had set his novel in the 1930s. But he has set it in the 1980s, when fish-knives were just a fading folk-memory - unless you were playing Jeeves at the time.

All this brooding gives Ashley a canyon-deep chip on his shoulder and, when he finds that Ned has read his diary, he plans his downfall. He and two other coves plant some weed on Ned, then grass him up. A strange twist of fate implicates Ned in an IRA plot; another one has him incarcerated on a Scandinavian island in an asylum that doubles as a prison.

Ned endures beatings (there's a lot of flabby sadism) and isolation but is saved by an elderly British intelligence officer, Babe, who teaches him how to become a whiz at chess, speak several languages, whistle the Ring cycle and become world expert at everything.

Ned escapes from the island multilingual, in superb condition and rich. Like an Archer hero, he plots his revenge. Disconcertingly, everyone in the book sounds like Stephen Fry.

It is, my dears, a naff old plot indeed. We wouldn't give a biscuit's toss if it had been draped with the wit, grace and profundity that are the usual hallmark of Fry's writing. But this is an awkward bit of work which has a terribly dashed-off feel, and strange resonances of other books: a hint of Erskine Childers, a touch of the Mitfords, a splash of Wodehouse, but all boiled up in this Archeresque plot. It all seems very thin and way, way below the old oyster's usual high standards. Let's hope he comes up with a pearl next time round.