BOOK REVIEW / A little matter of stature: The dork of cork by Chet Raymo Bloomsbury pounds 14.99

THINGS were better in C P Snow's day, when we had Two Cultures and people knew their place. Now the demarcation lines have broken down: novelists fancy themselves as scientists, stuffing their work with chaos theory and quantum mechanics, and scientists like Chet Raymo decide to try their hands at novels.

Raymo is a professor of astronomy and physics at Stonehill College, Massachusetts, which at least means that you can trust the scientific background of The Dork of Cork - just as well, since there's quite a bit of it. The Dork, Frank Bois, is a keen amateur astronomer, and his narration is sprinkled with cosmological detail - names of stars and constellations, descriptions of the moon, comets, auroras, eclipses, conjunctions and

occultations.

The book is only partly about things way up high, though; it's also concerned with things way down low. Much of the action takes place below waist level, partly because it is about the affairs of Frank's mother, a fabulously pretty, sexually voracious (and, incidentally, clairvoyant) French woman, and partly because Frank is an achondroplastic dwarf - 43 inches tall and 43 years old at the time he is narrating the events of his life.

Frank's height and his astronomy are bound up: his twin obsessions, women and stars, exist on roughly the same plane, beautiful but way beyond his reach. His 'deformity' is, however, also the key to literary celebrity - Penguin takes up Frank's book, Nightstalk, a collection of meditations on the stars mixed with reminiscence, much of it salacious, and whisk him off to England to do the chatshow circuit. It's made clear that Nightstalk is a good book, but also that Frank's disability is a terrific gimmick; or, as Frank puts it, 'My publishers know that my stature has a currency, a specie of exchangeable worth.'

Much of the novel is padded out with unnecessary synonyms. Raymo never uses an easy word ('light') when there's a polysyllable lurking ('luminescence'), and his cod Irishisms are embarrassing (as at Frank's birth: ' 'Tis a lad,' he said, beaming into the imploring eyes of the exhausted girl. 'And look at the size of the turnip between his legs, a fine big root of a thing from a black-earth hill' '). The book is packed with hesitations and doubt about language - 'How shall I put it?', 'What shall I call it?' - but the questions never get a very surprising answer: 'He made their lovemaking - how shall I say it? - sacramental.'

Throughout, there's a vacillation between morbid precision and deadly cliche. When you've sat through the opening pages fussing over the precise tint of the moon at the mid-umbral stage of an eclipse, it's hard not to feel let down a few chapters later when Frank wanders home through moonlight that's simply 'pearly'. At times, Raymo overloads the story with particulars - he mentions dozens of colours, including chartreuse, absinthe, fuchsia, sorrel, pearl-pink, pinkish-olive and fuchsia again. More often than not, he collapses into inattentive vagueness - the sky is 'glorious', 'spectacular', 'brilliant', 'miraculous' or just plain 'beautiful'.

The same lapses of observation afflict Frank. There's no sense of what it's like to be a dwarf - no mention of any physical barriers he might face. For Raymo as much as for any of his characters, dwarfism is a gimmick; Frank's a dwarf because it's an appealing concept and because it makes room for a few neat metaphors and a couple of weak jokes, but he could have had a hunchback or polio or been a thalidomide victim - anything that could be labelled deformed or grotesque. It would be unfair to call this a cruel book (it has a cloyingly happy ending); it does, however, seem oddly small-minded.