What are the perils of biography? A professional life-and-timer would probably insist that they are narrowly practical: a stash of new information, say, looming into view just as the book reaches proof stage.
Novelists who write about biographers, on the other hand, tend to be more interested in ethical faultlines: changing your mind halfway through, for example, or acquiring new data guaranteed to dim the subject's lustre. AS Byatt in The Biographer's Tale and Penelope Lively in According to Mark have both written entertainingly on these themes, and Michael Palin's second novel is a further attempt to plough a fictional field whose topsoil has long since been swept away.
It was Thomas Carlyle who came up with the idea of the Hero as Man of Letters. Sadly, fiftysomething Keith Mabbut, Palin's protagonist, is no one's idea of an intellectual. A once celebrated environmental journalist, lately returned from Shetland and a history of the local oil terminal, neither his professional nor his personal life is up to much. His wife has left him for an older and richer man. His two children wax ever more independent. Into this ground-down middle-aged existence, most of it lived out in far from enticing north London, steps his somewhat implausible dear-boying literary agent Silla, and the even less plausible figure of Ron Latham of Urgent Books, avid to offer cash-strapped Keith a deal he can't refuse.
The subject is Hamish Melville, a veteran eco-campaigner whose reputation is almost as legendary as his refusal to be profiled, interviewed or appear on TV. The bait is a credulity-stretching advance of £180,000 (has Palin ever written a biography? Does he know what sort of sums they command these days in a world of celebrity memoirs and mommy porn?).
Initial reluctance overcome, Keith heads for darkest India in devious pursuit. Here he is kidnapped by Maoist guerrillas, rescued by the object of his quest, watches Meville mobilise the locals against a land-devouring mine and, having impressed the environmental warrior with his steely resolve, emerges with the great man on his side.
As you will already have inferred, none of this will do for shifty Mr Latham, who demands rewrites and has his own secret agenda. Meanwhile, one or two sub-plots flicker and glow. As sympathetic Mae, met in the course of the Scottish trip, proves undetachable from Lerwick, Keith is consoling himself with buxom Tessa. His daughter's asylum-seeking Iranian boyfriend is, alas, not all he seems, and the £4,000 Keith contributes to the fighting fund could have been better spent.
A high-octane prose style might possibly have given this some resonance, but Planet Palin is a world where enthusiasm is infectious, smiles thin, barks gruff and lurches violent. India, Keith discovers, is "exhilarating and alarming at the same time". Thankfully, as the deep-fried aubergines are succeeded by endless bhindi bhajis, everyone gets enough to eat.
I was worried about hard-drinking Silla, who goes down with a fluey headache and whose chauffeur remarks: "I drive her four year. I never see her look like that", but this, like much else in the book, turns out to be a red herring. If the search for the "real" Melville that occupies the novel's final stretch proves faintly predictable, then the fairytale ending is quite as far-fetched as the machinations of the obligatory rainforest-despoiling corporation.
Like nearly everything to which Palin has set his hand in a long and distinguished career, The Truth is immensely well-intentioned, resolutely on the side of the angels and overflowing with wry good humour. In some ways, this overflow is the problem. Beguiled by its evocations of subcontinental cuisine, impressed by its sagacious remarks about the "closed, conspiratorial" nature of the modern city, nonetheless the reader may well conclude that the material needed a Paul Theroux or a Justin Cartwright to do it justice.
DJ Taylor's biographies include Orwell: The Life (Vintage).
