So here is Smith's The Electric Hotel. I make no prophecies. It's a kind of historical novel, about the beginnings of silent film. Claude Ballard is a photographer, employed at the hospital of the Salpetriere in Paris, to photograph the inmates, mostly hysterical female lunatics, so their doctors can use their appearance in diagnosis.

He goes to a show put on by the Lumiere brothers, of their new cinematographe: a whole lot of small segments of film, children eating their breakfast, people in the street, domestic images. People are amazed.

Claude auditions to be a salesman for this machine, taking pictures of a cat dropped from a height and landing upon its feet, but most particularly of his sister's dying moments from tuberculosis. Not so cruel as it sounds; she wants him to.

He gets a job with the Lumieres, travelling, to Australia and to America. In the United States he becomes a film maker himself, going beyond the fragments, splicing a number of bits together to make a narrative. It's the story of a widow, dying of tuberculosis, who runs a hotel where she seems to act as a sort of vampire on her guests.

The star is a wonderful actress called Sabine Montrose, whom he first saw playing Hamlet, and whom he regards as the love of his life.

This story lends itself to all sorts of special effects, culminating in the ending, where the burning widow (played not by Sabine but by their stuntman partner) jumps into the river Hudson from the flaming gondola of a dirigible, which then catches fire and explodes.

No chance of a second take at that. But it goes well and they are extremely proud of their work of art. They sell it very successfully to all sorts of picture palaces.

But then, catastrophe. Thomas Edison who has been beavering away taking out patents for everything he can find linked to photography, casts an ultimatum: anyone who shows the movie will be cut off from any of his devices. Nobody can go against this.

It's the end of the movie, and probably of Claude's career.

The novel begins with the elderly Claude being interviewed by a film student, who is astonished to discover that the famous byword of a movie isn't irretrievably lost, but is in a suitcase under Claude's bed. They will restore it.

But before this we follow Claude to first world war Belgium where he is captured by the Germans and set to making propaganda films for them, which he subverts by putting an extra three minutes of the truth at the end.

He catches up with the lost Sabine in Andorra, whence she fled with the consumptive widow's children because of the horrible letters she got from people who saw the movie. I thought these were a play on Twitter trolling, but Smith tells us they are exactly based on Mark Twain's experience.

The film is restored and its showing brings the surviving characters together.

This is the plot of the film but it is not told so simply. Smith is fond of vivacious set pieces and this is how the novel is shaped. He spends a lot of time finding fine words to describe the experience of early cinema: 'my own transience captured forever', 'unfurl time itself on to a silk screen', 'that silver skinned river of light', 'life's appetites and sorrows would spangle and warp against a bolt of silk'.

A lot of the early part of the novel is spent on this phrase-making, but as things get tougher he does less of it.

Perhaps because of this manner of creating spectacular set pieces the characters are larger than life, which paradoxically, until you think about it, makes them smaller than life.

It's because when you do that to them you make them into caricatures. Claude, Sabine, Chip the stuntman, do not appear as human beings we care about but as figures in a silent movie.

Of course there's nothing wrong with this. You could say it is very clever in a novel about the silent cinema. You could even say you are showing not telling. It's altogether admirable.

It may not be my favourite kind of novel writing, but you would have to say, that's my problem.