Summerland, by Michael Chabon

A Tolkienesque whimsy caught on the field of dreams

As the post-Rowling battle for all-age readerships intensifies, so too does the sheer wildness of imagination in writers hoping to produce the next bestselling crossover novel. Summerland is a case in point. Set in tiny Clam Island, Washington, it features four parallel universes based upon interlocking trees, werefoxes, otters and other mutant mammals, a giant transformed into a midget, and a smooth-talking Coyote out to destroy the world.

Against him and his bat-winged goblin cohorts are ranged 11-year-old Ethan Feld and his feisty contemporary Jennifer T Rideout, daughter of the local drunk. At most immediate risk is their own island, once blessed with a perfect climate but now a target for ruthless developers, another manifestation of the evil they are up against.

Although the author, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, is a devoted admirer of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, there is no evidence here that he is driven by the strong personal motivation found in the fiction of these two legendary figures. Instead, his story is chiefly informed by the type of whimsical drollery which, like a watched kettle, never quite manages to get to boiling point. It is also bound together by baseball imagery, involving a series of closely described games played out for nothing less than the future of the universe.

British readers, used to accounts of cricket matches in classics from The Pickwick Papers to The Go-Between, should not baulk when American writers respond with equally loving descriptions of their national game. But there is so much in these pages, involving terms as opaque as signature doubles, seeds, short-hop grounders, foul-tipped third strikes, squirts and creaming. Harry Potter's purely imaginary Quidditch is far easier to follow.

Other irritations accrue. While Ethan talks like a normal child, all those he meets on his inter-universe travels respond in the folksy jargon familiar from the novels of Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, but sadly repetitive once stripped of emotional conviction.

Even so, there are some moving scenes. At one point Ethan has to cope with the apparent re-appearance of his dead mother. This is yet another ploy by wicked Coyote to get hold of the all-important magical wooden branch – later transformed into a baseball bat – which is his young adversary's only effective weapon. Just for a time, optimistic and cheerful Ethan comes to feel "how badly made life was, and how flawed". Like baseball itself, it too was "filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won."

But moments of truth like these fit uneasily into a narrative otherwise so relaxed that it reads like one of those spun-out home-grown stories told with no real intention of ever going into print. At 492 pages, the real mystery of this overblown saga is how a respected author could have spent so much time and effort over something quite as self-indulgent. Or is it all the fault of baseball itself, and the way it has mesmerised American authors to the point where one more imaginary scorecard is definitely one strike-out too many?