Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp465

So the great peanut farmer president has, in his eighth decade, turned his formidable energies to fiction. There will be those, in these cruel and cynical times, who will greet the news with a certain weary sigh. Jimmy Carter, for all his distinguished work on behalf of peace and equality, remains something of a joke figure.

He may have won a Nobel prize, and have set up a foundation for the furtherance of all things good and virtuous, he may pop up at times of international crisis to play the role of honest broker, yet still there is something inexplicably irritating about the man — the pearly teeth maybe, or those crinkly, sincere eyes. His written work hardly helps. Among his 16 published books — Carter gets to his desk at five and puts in three hours of word-work before the day begins — are collections of thoughts, poems and memories with such uplifting titles as Everything to Gain, Sources of Strength, Why Not the Best? and The Virtues of Aging.

Normally it would be bad form to introduce an author’s image and personality into a review of his novel but, since it was precisely those things that caused The Hornet’s Nest to be published at all, it is only fair to point out that the same quality of dogged self-importance that makes it difficult to take Carter entirely seriously as a man is also evident in his fiction.

The mystery is what on earth possessed him to write a novel at all. The Hornet’s Nest has many of the ingredients to make a perfectly readable work of popular history. Its subject, that of the lives caught up in the confusion of loyalties that became America’s War of Independence, is impressively researched, with almost every chapter revealing some insight into the unexpected alliances of war, and aspects of domestic, military and social life among frontiersmen, Quakers, tribesmen and soldiers.

The prose is unfussy but serviceable (particularly welcome at a time when another American president has problems with spoken English), even if its prevailing narrative tone is sometimes that of a slightly preachy historian.

For those who like their history served up with a light dressing of fiction to disguise the taste, this is palatable enough, but readers who look to historical fiction to add mood, pace, colour, argument and above all character to facts will find Carter’s novel a hard slog. Its cast of characters, from its hero, the unheroically named Ethan Pratt, to Newota, a young Indian, Thomas Brown, an embittered ranger, through to Quash Dolly, a beautiful black slave, are promisingly varied but their personalities remain dead on the page.

In fact, The Hornet’s Nest could serve creative writing students as an example of how a perfectly respectable narrative, carefully researched and inoffensively written, can be unconvincing as fiction. Infatuated by his historical material, the author allows fact to clog up the narrative and, more disastrously, much of the dialogue. Laudably clear-eyed about the cruelties that were perpetrated by both sides, he is embarrassingly inept at describing scenes of pain, love, grief or fear. In fact, the more dramatic the situation — a rape, the public hanging of a brother, massacres, the death of a child — the more resolutely Carter’s prose declines to rise to the challenge.

Fiction requires a certain ruthlessness and it may be that the former president is just too nice a man to contemplate messy matters of death and sex without embarrassment. All the same, he could have tried slightly harder when, in the closing pages, he describes Ethan Pratt approaching a moment of passion: “He was overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness, and was also aroused sexually, which his tight trousers made obvious to both of them.”

This is a well-meaning but lifeless novel. In celebration of President Carter’s 80th birthday two days ago, we should all wish him a healthy, busy — and entirely fiction-free — old age.

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