James Meek has taken the old literary injunction to “write about what you know” to heart in his fourth novel. Rooted in a landscape (Taliban-run Afghanistan) that he knows well, worrying away at the moral pitfalls of a trade (foreign correspondent) that he has been practising for nearly two decades, and focusing on a jaded journalist (Adam Kellas) whose spare time is spent writing novels, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is steeped in self-referential detail – so much so that Meek himself even makes a Hitchcock-like cameo appearance at one point as “a small pale man” from The Guardian “with delicate hands, gingerish hair, round glasses and a slightly lopsided smile”.

Kellas, one suspects, is having a rather harder time of it than Meek. A rootless, restless individual with a failed marriage and a trail of unhappy relationships behind him, he seems, as the main action of the novel begins in late 2002, to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Back from a traumatic stint in Afghanistan, his bitterness about his job and worry about his own shaky principles finally spill over at a north London dinner party, where the unexpected appearance of a mean-spirited ex, the smug assumptions of his champagne-socialist hosts and the sexual indiscretions of a childhood friend together send him into a rage, smashing plates and hurling a bust of Lenin through the front window.

Salvation of a sort appears in the form of a mysterious text message from an American journalist and former lover, the Sphinx-like Astrid, and the promise of a large American advance for a tawdry thriller he has written about a future war between Europe and the US. Throwing everything up, boarding the first plane he can find, he sets off across the Atlantic, blood dripping down his arm from the plate-smashing, in a desperate attempt to salvage his old life.

Meek, the author of the Man Booker-longlisted The People’s Act of Love, is no slouch as a novelist, and there are moments in this book that are genuinely affecting. Most of them, it has to be said, have to do with his day job as a journalist. He is good, for instance, at delineating the provisional life of a foreign correspondent, and good, too, at fixing place.

It is when moving away from these skills, however, that the novel comes unstuck. Meek is not particularly adept at characterisation, and, in a book that in its latter stages relies heavily on our engagement with Kellas and Astrid, this proves a distinct handicap. Both appear tiresomely solipsistic and bombastic, neither has any interior animation to speak of, and no amount of late shading-in can make the intimidating Astrid feel like a figure worth fighting for.

The plot – so top heavy towards the end that the novel eventually sinks beneath a tide of hastily introduced detail – also causes problems. The result is a book that, for all its much-trumpeted interest in the nature of authenticity, has a peculiarly inauthentic ring to it.

WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT by James Meek
Canongate £16.99 pp295

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