This over-praised, overlong novel is in trouble before it starts. The acknowledgments open with a tribute to someone “who is as warm as she is knowledgeable” and continue in the same saccharine manner. In the prologue we are met by pompous phrases (“the jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise”) or are annoyed by silly metaphors (“the greying light arm-wrestled the sky”). There are many two-word sentences: “

The survivors.” “One corpse.” “The sirens.” Indeed, there are many two-word paragraphs. The grim thought occurs that writing like this has helped the book to its position at the top of the American bestseller lists.

Nine-year-old Liesel is the book thief of the title. In 1939, after seeing her brother die, she goes to live with the Hubermanns, a foster family, near Munich. She grows up during the war, becoming fond of “Papa” with his accordion, less so of his irritable,foul-mouthed wife. She gets into fights, makes friends and is involved in sports events. She learns to keep the dangerous secret that a Jew has been hidden by the good-hearted Hubermanns. Above all, she steals books and discovers how to read them, finally becoming a writer herself.

Markus Zusak shows good intentions in describing wartime Germany as an extraordinary country inhabited by ordinary people. Organising the story around a girl preoccupied with clandestine writing might seem parasitic on an already famous book, although here the Jewish secret scribbler is male and hidden in the basement not the attic. The mere facts are indeed powerfully affecting; the Hitler Youth is a baleful presence, neighbours suffer terribly at Stalingrad, prisoners are marched to Dachau, those who take pity on them are beaten and, finally, Allied bombers kill nearly everyone we’ve got to know.

Unfortunately, Zusak has made Death himself the storyteller, ruining the book’s cohesion and plausibility. Writers such as Anatoli (Babi Yar) and Günter Grass (Cat and Mouse) managed with great concentration to describe the horror of war through the eyes of a child; their authenticity derives from the fearsome gap between innocence and experience. Zusak’s Death is a cumbersome trope; he doesn’t solve the narrative problem so much as betray the author’s failure to recognise its nature. He is verbose and vapid, sentimental and simplistic, pleased with his own facile ironies, constantly inviting the reader’s connivance in tediously familiar postmodern games.

Sometimes Death sounds like a goofy teenager: “You don’t always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany.” The laboured faux-naïf idiom only draws attention to the refusal to engage with profound and stubborn problems of historical understanding. As a means of moral exploration, its nudging facetiousness is both smug and shallow. One of the many annoying interpolations in bold font reads: “THE SITUATION OF HANS AND ROSA HUBERMANN. Very sticky indeed. In fact, frightfully sticky.” Being Jewish in Nazi Germany is “a ruinous piece of the dumbest luck around”. One comment reads, “So much good, so much evil. Just add water”, reducing a desperate ethical predicament to complacent vulgarity.

Elsewhere, Death tries to be poetic. “Drizzle came down in spades”, he tells us in one loose metaphor. He likes flaunting conspicuously synaesthetic phrases that don’t work when looked at closely: “the smell of friendship”, “the scent of Hitler’s gaze”, “he tasted like regret in the shadows of trees”. This pretentiousness suggests that Zusak has thought of setting himself a stylistic challenge, only to take the slick or crowd-pleasing way out. Death nudges us: “A KEY WORD — imagined”. It’s a dangerous literary tactic to make a portentous promise that isn’t performed.

Words are at the centre of the novel’s claims on our imagination. Liesel holds words “in her hands like the clouds”. A fable in the book is called The Word Shaker. She realises, as others have, that “without words the Führer was nothing”. Yet at the climax, the words that Zusak chooses have a glossy Hollywood emptiness. Liesel addresses her dead mother: “God damn it, you were so beautiful.” The Jews in the death camps have “broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts”. Language like this trivialises whatever it touches. #

THE BOOK THIEF
by Markus Zusak Doubleday £12.99

Available at the Books First price of £11.99 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy