Anthony Joesph's genre-hopping novel, The African Origin of UFOs is a novel so rich in imagery that it should perhaps be taken only in moderation: a small dose every day. Published by the excellent Salt Publishing, surely one of the most interesting small presses working in Britain at the moment, Joesph's novel is lyrical and complex. As well as a novelist, Joseph is a poet and musician, and his writing is striking both for its musicality and also for its intelligence and sharpness of vision.

my aunt selma she is older now. her beard gone grey, as her mother's did. her jowl fuller. her hands are wire veined. but still she speaks with the tone of small birds, of parakeets, or yellow corn birds. it is a voice reserved for an only daughter. light blows through her house like wind through a seive, shaking dust from two frayed albums of old photographs under her corrugated coffee table.

It is rare to find a voice this lyrical whilst at the same time being this funny. Joseph's keen wit, honed no doubt by his work as a performance poet, is everywhere in evidence, and there are some wonderful one-liners, my personal favourite being, "Joe sam was so bad even catfish shaved to meet him". However, he writes far less persuasively when he renounces this lyricism, wit and clarity and lapses into what looks suspiciously like philosophical incoherence:

Elements: of the living eye are. Seldom dealt with.precision. most ways sideways inverted. Or abstract. When there is separation between act. and observation/action and cognition. notating delays the true trajectory of biological dust and signals instead to relay decoys. these decoys or possibilities themselves become part of the view to be captured and are so: essential to any understanding of motion or cognitive dissonance. Essence (itself). is an abstract object. It cannot be brought back from a dream.

I am far from sure that it is possible to get a great deal of sense out of passages such as these; but perhaps I am simply insufficiently schooled in Joseph's sources. And here lies what seems to me to be the most serious problem with the book. When I reached the end of the novel, I was no wiser as to what it was about than I was at the beginning. In search of illumination, I turned to the introduction. From the introduction it becomes apparent that the twenty four chapter structure of the book is based upon Timothy Leary's theory of the evolution of human consciousness through twenty-four evolutionary niches "from birth to death, from stasis to stasis, from water to land to space to panspermic dust", and that the novel is inspired by Ornette Coleman's "aesthetic philosophy of 'Harmolodics'". Within this framework, the novel is an interweaving of three different narratives. The first is a science-fiction tale set on the planet of Kunu Supia in the year 3005. On Kunu Supia changes in the climate have meant that only those with dark skin can survive and melanin is a contraband drug. In this world, Joe Sambucus Nigra and his adversary Bo Nuggy (another beautifully drawn character), battle for supremacy. This science-fiction narrative is interwoven with a section that concerns the present - a series of flashbacks ('genetic flashbacks' the introduction tells us, not altogether helpfully) and fragments of travelogue about Trinidad. The third section, "The genetic memory of ancient Ïerè," moves into the deep past and conjures creation myths with the 'desire to reanimate the spirit and substance of Caribbean magic, myths, fables and rituals.'

The difficulty here is that none of this is apparent from the text itself. As a result, The African Origin of UFOs threatens to drift dangerously close to meaninglessness when it is read outside of the context set by the introduction. To be sure, Joseph is attempting to explore the limits of what is possible in literature; but when we need to be schooled first in harmolodics, Timothy Leary's twenty four stages of consciousness, the history and climatological changes of the entirely fictitious planet of Kunu Supia - none of which can be derived in any clarity from the text itself - it seems as if Joseph is perpetually at risk of reverting to a purely private language, mythology and philosophy. "Essence (itself). is an abstract object. It cannot be brought back from a dream", he writes. Perhaps; but if the writer's dreams are to remain compelling, it is necessary to nevertheless cross this gulf to bring back something communicable. Obscurity is not the same as depth or complexity. As a writer, Joseph has the latter two qualities in spades; but it would be a shame if his evident talent were to be overlooked on account of the former.

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