North London is a more modish breeding ground for novelists than Notting Hill ever was – spawning among others Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Will Self. Nicola Barker, who sets Small Holdings here on her own home turf, won comparisons with all these writers with her very first book. In her third novel, however, she goes a tube stop too far, and picks a particularly unrewarding gap in the map to plot her literary allotment – the gardeners’ world of a privatised park in Palmers Green. She is one of the few young authors who has progressed from the traditional subjects of the sex-and-drug culture, and moved on to explore the suburban drudge culture and the perils of ordinary people who are unaccountably worried that they’re not quite ordinary enough.

Small Holdings is about fitting in. The theme is outlined by a taciturn reincarnation of Percy Thrower: ‘Which was worse, feeling different but fitting in or being different but feeling in your heart like you should fit but not quite fitting?’ The misfits who deal with this poser are Phil, a chronically shy gardener, Doug, his manic supervisor, Nancy, a half-blind driver, and Saleem, a spiteful one-legged curator. When Doug seems to be going off the rails before a critical meeting with Enfield Council’s Park Management Committee, Phil must overcome his shyness and step in to save the day.

The novel centres on Phil, a ‘flower born to blush unseen’, and unkind readers might wish this flower to remain that way. Phil’s rites of passage form the plot of the book, as he is drugged, derided, seduced and has his eyebrows shaved off, all as behavioural therapy for his debilitating timidity. Highlights include his visiting various chemists in North London to request such blush-making condiments to modern-day life as ‘extra small condoms’.

This is a conspicuously shameless conceit, as condoms, like McDonald’s cola, don’t come in any size smaller than regular.

As you might guess, Small Holdings is not about big issues but about the small ones; small people, small intellects and the small victories of the emotional underclass. But these Lilliputian dramas are made even smaller because we don’t get to see them, but only hear about them afterwards, a case of all Tell and no Show. Phil even loses his virginity in a state of sensory deprivation, where he can’t see or feel what’s going on.

In fact, all the climaxes in the book are non-events – the pivotal council meeting fizzles out without any material outcome at all. A symptom of Doug’s madness is his obsession with ‘the Gaps’, those bits of London that don’t have their own postal code, such as the South and Northeast, another metaphor to show that Londoners don’t ‘fit together’. But this is hardly mad, just drably anal. The choice of the setting and the plot is curious because Barker’s previous writing was characterised by fascinating conceits of the imagination and delicate toe-dipping into the fantastic. This time she wastes her considerable descriptive powers on a tale which can’t show them off.

Barker’s novel would be sharper than a blade of grass, if only the plot weren’t dull as ditchwater. Perhaps it is my unmodish lack of interest in the subject which is to blame.

Apparently, gardening is to people in the Nineties what restaurants were to people in the Eighties, and theatre was to people in the Sixties. As for the critics’ comparisons of Barker with Amis, Barnes and Self, whose latest works include tales of grey and mediocre characters, Nicola Barker’s book will still fit on the shelf between theirs rather well.