A 22-year-old Indian student living in London wakes up six days after the Live Aid concert in 1985.

He is still angry at the "dance of death" he has witnessed on his television screen. He feels there was something "macabre" about all those spectators clapping along to images of starving Africans, but no-one agrees with him: "his own position on this matter underlined to him his isolation from the world - from London, for that matter".

The student's name is Ananda and he is an aspiring poet. You agree with him on Live Aid and sympathise with his alienation, whilst recognising the absurd grandiosity of it. You happily turn the page and start to follow Ananda and his thoughts as his day unfolds; eventually the night closes in, and you wish you had not.

Young aspiring poets can be terrible bores. They often have a lofty sense of their own purposelessness and enjoy their despair far too much. This is fine in real life, but when they're fictionalised and not ridiculed with enough gusto they become tiresome. You soon find out Ananda is rarely happy. He complains about his noisy neighbours, the Patels; he complains about not being published in Poetry Review; he complains about his university professors. He makes mundane comments about poems, and thinks in a boring way about sex. One presumes this is all meant to be terribly funny but it is simply irritating.

Although Ananda prefers Indian classics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Odysseus Abroad is self-consciously written under the shadow of The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. Ananda's day comprises of a walk around London. The trivial day-to-day shrivels beneath the scale and scope of the epic, and there are plenty of jokes about the transmigration of souls. But unlike Joyce's masterpiece it is not trying to excavate the inner-consciousness, and it certainly doesn't do for London what Ulysses did for Dublin. If it wasn't for the street names, this could be any city.

Amit Chaudhuri has now written six novels and has a number of accolades to his name. It seems strange then that his prose can be so clumsy: "natural light in the kitchen was bleak; it stood doing nothing, illuminating the fridge". This oxymoron is followed on the same page by an incorrect use of the past simple. Scarcely a paragraph goes by without an arbitrary use of the dash. It's a long shot but perhaps these grammatical stumbling blocks are supposed to mirror the physical ones we encounter whilst tramping about town.

At least Ananda's walk ensures he meets other people. The best of these is his eccentric uncle and peripatetic partner Radhesh, who cannot talk about poetry without mentioning the Bengali master Rabindranath Tagore. His toothless smile is a result of once confronting a skinhead who threw an apple at him. Radhesh is obsessed with race and introduces himself as a "black Englishman".

Both uncle and nephew are keen to avoid being labelled Asian: "what was 'Asian' anyway - an equivocal category, neither British nor Indian, for people who had essentially nowhere to go?" Rhadesh's attempts to assimilate into English culture are funny and he clearly enjoys strange English customs. Ananda only has cynicism for most of it and wants to return home.

The only problem is he doesn't know where home is anymore.

Like Homer and Joyce, Chaudhuri is good at writing about food and the digestive system in general.

He frequently slips in jokes about the lack of any real excremental tradition in English fiction.

Ananda, obviously, thinks all the Indian food in London is inauthentic, another way to discover "the unfamiliar in the familiar: dosas that looked like but didn't taste like dosas, bhelpuri that resembled bhelpuri but was something else".

So on we plod, until Ananda and Radhesh arrive back at 'Ithaca', Ananda's flat on Warren Street.

After they watch Rising Damp, Radhesh announces his departure and Ananda nods, "briefly and fiercely hating the peace and quiet at the end of everything".

But he knows he should be "grateful for the peace" before the Patels return.

Then again, you know he will be glad of their homecoming because he secretly enjoys hating them, and in the interim, like the good self-indulgent poet he is, he will use those peaceful moments to hate himself.