The British Are Coming

" 'On what?' "

" 'Gibbon.' "

" 'The monkey?' "

And, "Their mouths struck as if in a Dantean travesty of a kiss. . . ."

It's a toss-up as to who will find these jokes less funny, those who get them or those who don't.

As if to remind us that he can be a superb prose stylist, Helprin pours out sentences such as, "Three marginicidal kings have perished there. It is beyond the dissilient cliffs of pure water that cleave the great ocean and fall through infinite tunnels of mist. It is where the vast stinking body of the expired Dragon of Penrith was laid to rest, only to vapourise and disappear immediately upon contact with the white-hot ground. Oh, devils! Oh, God forsaken! Oh, darkness, stench, and flame!"

Clearly, the passage is meant to sound comically overwrought, but even on that level it is, like much of the book, overwritten. In contrast, Freddy and Fredericka stops cold, and the writing goes flat and earnest when the author seems to step in and tell us what the book is really about. "There was no way properly," reads one such passage near the end, "to credit or acknowledge the scores of millions who had fought in the name of the king. . . . Only God could so acknowledge, and, as for the king, this was the unbearable burden that would press him down for the rest of his days." If I'm not mistaken, the author is displaying an affection for the traditions of the British monarchy that would make T.S. Eliot blush.

Helprin is fond of telling interviewers that he is a traditionalist who doesn't read modern fiction, but Freddy and Fredericka is padded with enough tedious wordplay and exhausted literary conceits to fill several volumes by the authors Helprin says he doesn't read. The book never congeals as a fable, satire, farce or anything except a royal self-indulgence. ·

Allen Barra is a staff writer for Salon.com. His latest book is "The Last Coach: A Life of Paul 'Bear' Bryant," forthcoming in September.