In Gods and Warriors, the first of a quintet of novels to be set in the bronze age Mediterranean, Michelle Paver's familiar strengths and weaknesses are soon apparent. Hylas, a 12-year-old goatherd, is given a superb bronze dagger by a dying slave, though he doesn't begin to understand what it signifies or how the dreaded Crows  the warrior clan of Koronos, rulers of Mycenae  will move heaven and earth to retrieve it. Soon on the run, Hylas encounters the daughter of the High Priestess, brave 12-year-old Pirra, who has defiantly branded her own cheek and escaped an arranged marriage. After they are stranded on the Island of the Goddess and caught up in bitter rivalries between Lakonians, Mycenaeans and Minoans, their uneasy but growing mutual dependence drives the story.

Paver handles with great aplomb a large cast of horrible humans, angry ghosts, petrified corpses, divine presences and  much the most alluring  a pod of dolphins, but before long one suspects that the predicaments in which Hylas and Pirra find themselves have all been calculated like a dot-to-dot drawing. The plot is so planned and predictable, as are the rousing single-sentence paragraphs with which many of the short chapters end: "In the corner, the dead slave opened his eyes and stared at him"; "A hand shot out of the shelter and grabbed her wrist".

Much of the text is written in these short, stabbing sentences and, combined with the plot's speed and the way we are told what to think rather than being left to imagine, it becomes exhausting. This is a novel without sufficient change of pace. When Pirra says, "everything was happening so fast, there was never any time to talk about it", she could have been speaking of the book itself.

It would be unjust to say she has a tin ear, but Paver has very little sense of the music of language, and often gives the impression of trying too hard. The overdose of adverbs ("ragingly", "horribly", "savagely", "dizzyingly" in the first two dozen lines alone) is indicative of the author's insecurity (as well as the editor's sloppiness) and inability to find the clinching word.

And yet, and yet  The quality of Paver's research is impeccable and, reading her vivid descriptions of bronze age life, one feels in safe hands. No less impressive is the way in which she portrays the respect between humans and animals, the sense of presiding fate governing all creation, and the rituals of propitiation made to divine forces so as not to antagonise them.

Paver very nimbly uses three different viewpoints (Hylas, Pirra and a dolphin called Spirit), and perhaps the most memorable and feeling scenes are those in which Spirit intuits the children's plight, and responds to it, several times allowing them to hold on to her fin and speed away from danger (and once almost drowning Hylas in the process). Some may think Paver overplays a dolphin's abilities; I willingly suspended my disbelief.

I could add that Gods and Warriors is cool or even chilly, and utterly humourless. Or I could say it's a racy page-turner, engaging with the darker side of power and the faultlines of alliance and friendship. I could write that Hylas and Pirra never really tugged at my heart. And I could say their struggle to survive is often terrifying. All these things would be true.

 Kevin Crossley-Holland's Scramasax is published by Quercus.