Coraline by Neil Gaiman

A contemporary Alice in a literary blunderland

Lewis Carroll's stories were the first truly great crossover titles, written for children and adults. Now Diana Wynne Jones (a children's author also worth any adult crossing the road for) states on the cover of this novel that it "will nudge Alice in Wonderland out of its niche at last". Terry Pratchett – with the new authority of this year's Carnegie Medal for an outstanding children's book – also declares it a masterpiece. Is this, then, a book not just to read but perhaps to invest in, given the inflated price of certain first editions of modern children's books?

Best known for his DC Comics Sandman series, once described by Norman Mailer as "a comic strip for intellectuals", Neil Gaiman also writes for younger readers. This story describes a little girl's adventures when she passes through the wall of her house into a land dominated by someone who looks like her mother, except for her black button eyes. Other surface resemblances with home crumble as Coraline realises that this other mother is offering her enticing treats with the idea of getting her to stay for good. She can then capture the child's soul, leaving her to join the husks of other children tempted in the past. But she is never a match for Coraline, who asks too many pertinent questions before outwitting her tormentor and returning home.

Like Alice, Coraline is a natural heroine – undaunted, tough-minded and no-one's fool. Passing through a wall instead of a looking-glass, she too has to cope with an unfamiliar world where animals speak, adults weep and there is a real fear of getting lost for ever.

However, while there are surface similarities in plot, Gaiman is never any match for Carroll as a writer. His sentences lack the verbal fizz of his extraordinary 19th-century rival; nor are there the depths and teasing ambiguities that have attracted scholars and students to Carroll over the years. In fact, Coraline would probably work just as well were it to have the graphic-novel treatment for which Gaiman is famous. Images of the false mother's dislocated hand, scuttling across the floor, as in a scene from The Beast with Five Fingers, might work even better visually than verbally.

The end result for this reader was a certain difficulty in retaining belief in such an unusual, unstructured story, peopled by characters who are neither one thing nor the other. The overall mood is also inconsistent, veering from the quizzical to the more ghoulishly distasteful. While the best graphic novels manage to set their own pervasive atmosphere from the first illustration, Coraline often seems uncertain about where it's going and what it's all about.

Dream-like and lacking those economies of imagination that stop the best fairy tales from spreading their fantasy contents too thin, Coraline never entirely convinces. It is also less amusing than it intends to be, with the various weird characters surrounding the little girl more stereotyped than genuinely comic. Given that both Pratchett and Wynne Jones have both written far better stories themselves, their current enthusiasm for this one is as great a puzzle as anything found within its own pages.