In London, at a party hosted by a publishing house and attended by Daniel and the rest of "the literary mob", washed-up poets and aspiring literary critics tell each other that they "simply must read Derrida".

Ackroyd is scathing about the book reviewing racket. Those who give good reviews are "fine critics". Those who don't are cretinous: "Oh The Spectator. Terrible circulation. Gale has just appointed some teenage literary editor. Ridiculous." (This is an in-joke — the "teenager" was Ackroyd himself.)

There is a pointed attack on literary editors who dole out books to reviewers "five or six at a time. As if they were tins of baked beans." Some of this sounds like personal grievance. It's certainly enough to make a reviewer nervous. One literary editor is described as "A bit stupid, actually, but friendly enough . . . Very much a journalist."

Journalists, of course, are held in contempt. At a party across town attended by Harry, who after serving his time on the "Peregrine Porcupine" gossip column has been promoted to news editor, the conversation is somewhat grubbier. Sir Martin Flaxman, editor of the Chronicle, tells Harry that he is proud to be "a muck raker" before asking his protégé: "Is my daughter a good fuck?" No Derrida here.

The brothers, though estranged, continue to cross paths. We are meant to be reminded of the chance encounters and coincidences in the novels of Dickens.

Daniel teaches Bleak House and is writing a book about the intersecting lives of the writers of London: "He had found in the work of novelists a preoccupation with the image of London as a web so taut and tightly drawn that the slightest movement of any part sent reverberations through the whole." The novel roams over the city: Camden, Notting Hill, Bayswater, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Mount Street, Highgate, Inner Temple. But if you didn't know London, you might struggle to distinguish Ackroyd's Shepherd's Bush from his Cheyne Walk. His descriptions of the city are so cursory they sometimes feel like little more than stops on the Tube map. Nor do the brothers ever really feel substantial. They are types: the hack, the intellectual, the lost boy. Rounded characters and a sense of place have been sacrificed for a magical realist atmosphere that slips through our fingers.

The three brothers never do inherit the kingdom, return with the golden goose or win the hand of a princess. And in Ackroyd's strange, amorphous London fairytale, there is no happily ever after.