And when did you last read your father?

Last night I was invited to dinner with Xinran. I might also have taken up the offer to attend drinks to mark the launch of Juan Gabriel Vasquez's new book. Or I could have just watched the football.

But no, I was duty manager on the late shift. Another evening of refund fraudsters, computer glitches and discourse with customers with the wit and social graces of autistic camels.

I wonder if there are people out there with cherished dreams of working in shops? Possibly not beyond the age of seven, until which time playing shop is considered educational, rather than indicating stunted ambition.

Mind you, I did have a young lad come into the shop not so long ago asking about jobs. He said that he was looking for the sort of position which would allow him to sit behind the desk and read most of the day. No wonder we get treated with such disdain by customers if that's what they think we do in bookshops. Although, if we didn't have to spend quite so long tidying up after people for whom the effort of returning a book to the shelf seems a ludicrous imposition, we'd probably get through a few chapters.

I've found myself thinking along these lines as I'm reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, of which Heinemann were kind enough to send the most extravagantly packaged proof I've seen since HarperCollins did ones for William Dalrymple with incense sticks. They're hardbacks in boxes and they're numbered, after a fashion, with the names of each the 167 characters in the book. Mine's called Freddie after a character I have yet to encounter. I wonder if the allocation is anything other than random.

I'm particularly interested because I went to school with Nick. He was in the year above and we socialised occasionally. He was distinctly fey at the time, given to the wearing of fedoras and trench coats. Now I'm working in a bookshop, earning some pocket money on the side with some journalism, while he's sold his first novel for the usual 'significant' six-figure sum. Rather than an insignificant six-figure sum, I suppose.

He's also the son of John le Carré, which I should imagine is scarcely an impediment to finding oneself a publisher. But it would unfair to bear a grudge for that reason, not least because he will be dismissed as someone whose father's reputation and influence must have won him his publishng contract by every reviewer yet to write their own bestseller.

It would be pointless even to compare the two as writers, not least because Nick is on his first book while his father is nearly two dozen down the line. And because there's been forty years of fiction published since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was written. But the book deserves to be judged on its own merits, no matter that there might be easy comparisons to make. To describe a book as an ersatz version of another or a hybrid of two is of value only in a marketing context, not in making a critical evaluation.

A hundred and fifty pages in, I'm enjoying myself, I think principally because the author so very clearly is. It's yarn of a story, whose direction I can't begin to predict. We have a main character - with no name that I've spotted yet - who is a student of radical thinking and some gorgeous pastiche of the martial arts, surrounded by impassioned scene-stealers. It's only frustrating because our 'hero' is a little too passive, too clinically perceptive, too much of a pivot for the book, rather than an engine.

In a way, it's a pop culture White Teeth. Like Zadie Smith, he's thrown so many ideas at it that not all of them can stick, but what remains is a novel of such bravado and brio that to fail to enjoy it would be the act of a spoilsport. (It's hundred pages shorter than his first draft too, apparently.) What remains is a glorious patchwork quilt with so many little scraps of narrative that needed a home like this, a novel which celebrates the wonder of storytelling and the sheer joy of harnessing the power of language.