Each generation needs a new guide to the principles of science. In the 1970s it was Isaac Asimov's compendious Guide to Science, in two fat Pelicans; before that, J.B.S. Haldane or H.G. Wells. Today's version is Natalie Angier's Canon, adorned with a cover recommendation from Richard Dawkins. “An intoxicating cocktail of fine science writing,” he calls it.

It's a brave man who disagrees with Professor Dawkins. But Angier has a style that will alienate at least as many as it charms. Physicists decry crackpot theories with the phrase “not even wrong”. Angier's writing is not even bad. For her, a view is not a view. It is “the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you”.

She's keen on elegant variation, so that at second mention a spade is no longer just a spade but some baroque elaboration of a digging implement, with a cultural reference thrown in to show off the author as a well-rounded person. In an anecdote about Chicago, she mentions the city twice. The second time it becomes “the fabled birthplace of the skyscraper, the well-tailored gangster, and a bland, eponymously named rock band from the 1970s”. She's also hot on metaphor, a disease endemic in US science writers. So the rotation of the Earth becomes “dervish dancing”, which is simultaneously unhelpful and wrong.

I'm not making this up, honestly. Every page is crammed with cutesy wordplay, neologisms, and “fine writing” that invariably falls flat on its face. It's like being force-fed stale chocolate truffles.

Scientists, we are told, “have probed the Joycean chambers of the atom, read the memoirs of the cosmos virtually back to the moment of crowning, detangled the snarls of our DNA, and mapped the twitchy globe of Silly Putty we call our castle and our home”. Ugh.

Amid this thicket of fancy phrasemaking - heavens, it's catching - it is hard to remain patient long enough to work out Angier's message. I think it is that science is fun, but if it's fun, why does it need tricking out in a false beard and a joke nose? Reviewers are supposed to read a book all through but there are ample reasons for hurling this one into the next accordion pleat of earthscape as soon and as hard as possible. So I did.

The puzzle remains why Dawkins rates it so highly. Can he really believe “every sentence sparkles with wit and charm”? Or do he and Angier share an agent, or a publicist? They do, as a matter of fact. You may think this has influenced Dawkins's opinion. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

Faber, £17.99; 304pp

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