IT'S bad sign when you start wondering what to have for dinner half way through chapter three of a book and feel your eyelids drooping at the beginning of chapter four. Such an uninspiring start cannot be auspicious. Perhaps it's a little unfair to judge the power of a novel against the very necessities of life, but it is safe to say that the first half of The Telling won't ruin your appetite or your beauty sleep. You won't have to worry about going to work bleary-eyed because you sat up half the night saying: ''I'll just read to the end of this page.'' And: ''I'll just read to the end of this chapter.''

The problem lies mainly with the characters. Seymour, more accustomed to writing biographies than fiction, picked the storyline for The Telling from a real event involving poets Robert Graves and Laura Riding. Seymour herself recognised that the episode she selected was ''so extraordinary, so bizarre that it seemed more suited to fiction''. What was scarcely believable in life is hardly more credible when played out by decidedly sketchy protagonists. To be fair, some of the characters do fill out a little as the book progresses, but the initial sense of doubt and disinterest that their unconvincing personalities inspire tends to linger on. The frosty, respectable mother and the romantic semi-genius Chance Brewster are particularly dissatisfying and one-dimensional. However, should you manage to read the first three-quarters of The Telling, the pace does pick-up in the closing sections. The

novel has one driving force which the first 170-odd pages have been slowly (very slowly) building up to. What is Nancy Brewster's dark secret? Why was she sent to a mental institution? Who is the mysterious and enigmatic Isabel March, who is implicated in Nancy's demise? Isabel March, identified as one of the protagonists in Nancy's story early in the novel, does not appear in person until the last 50 pages of the book. Questions remain unanswered until the last possible moment, thereby managing to attract and retain the attention of the reader and inspire some measure of perseverance. Seymour, whose main strength lies in her ability to arouse curiosity rather than empathy, is wise to keep her revelations for the last few pages.