I wanted to shove the child.

I stuck with this for about six weeks of commuting, which is longer than it deserved, and the reason it took six weeks is that I kept putting it down at Slough and feeling no urge at all to pick it back up.

The setup: a concierge in a smart Paris building is secretly a great reader and hides it, and a twelve-year-old upstairs is a genius who plans to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Alternating chapters. You can see the shape of the good book in there.

Renee is the good half. Not all of her, but the part about hiding what you know from people who would resent you for knowing it. That's real, and I've watched people do it. There's a moment where she panics about being caught reading the wrong thing that I recognised so hard I looked up from the page.

Paloma is the problem. She is a twelve-year-old who talks like a footnote. Every one of her chapters is a small essay on how stupid adults are, delivered with total confidence, and the novel agrees with her every single time. No adult ever gets to be right in a way that costs her anything. By about the fourth of these I had started skipping ahead to find where the concierge came back, and I am not a skipper, I'm the person who reads the acknowledgements.

Then Ozu arrives and everything is repaired by a rich, kind, cultured man who sees through Renee in roughly four minutes. Which, fine, people do get seen. Am I being unfair? Probably. But it lands like a delivery.

The ending I won't spell out, except to say I have read three defences of it and they all come down to the same argument and I don't buy it. It felt chosen rather than earned. My friend Deb, who lent me the copy, says I'm being deliberately obtuse. She is normally right about books and hopeless about films.

On the commuting question, since that's the only expertise I've got: this is enormously put-downable, which for once I mean as an insult. A book can be interruptible because it is built in pieces you can hold, or it can be interruptible because you don't much care what happens next. It's the second one. I never once got to Paddington and thought, oh, a bit more.

Five. There are maybe eighty pages in here I would defend to anybody, and all of them are the concierge alone in her lodge with the cat and the tea, being nobody in particular. The remainder is a novel about how much better it is to have read a great deal than not to have, a thing I already agreed with and did not need argued at me for a whole spring.