Not for the first time, I find myself at odds with the general view of a book. If you look at the Amazon reviews This Thing of Darkness by the late Harry Thompson, they’re mostly five-star raves – “the best book I have ever read” is a typical comment.

What puzzles me is the unanimity. This Thing of Darkness is 700 pages, a length to tax the most dedicated reader. And usually, I am that reader. I can persist where others fail – Daniel Deronda held no fears for me. But I appear to have been the only person completely bored by This Thing of Darkness, the only person to have heaved a huge sigh of relief as I put it down for the last time.

On the face of it, This Thing of Darkness has a fascinating subject: three fascinating subjects, in fact. It deals principally with the career of Robert Fitzroy, a remarkable man who, while still in his 20s, captained the Beagle on the voyage that took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere. Not only that, but Fitzroy was also a brilliant mapmaker and the man who invented the shipping forecast (an innovation for which he was mocked and derided while alive, even though it was ultimately to save thousands of lives).

The second subject, of course, is that of Darwin himself, and the process by which he came to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection. Large chunks of the novel are taken up with arguments between him and Fitzroy about subjects such as whether the Biblical Flood really happened, and whether acquired characteristics can be passed to the next generation.

The third subject is British colonialism: a shocking, depressing and yet potentially engrossing story about how the British destroyed native populations – either intentionally, by shooting every man, woman and child; or unintentionally, by sending out missionaries who introduced diseases such as measles, which could wipe out every single inhabitant of a region.

The book fails (to my mind), principally because it can’t do justice to three big subjects in one volume. But it also fails because it lacks the key ingredient of a good novel, namely suspense: This Thing of Darkness merely recounts one event after another, at tedious length. Thompson must have done masses of research – on naval conditions in the 19^th century, on Darwin, on Fitzroy, on social history, on evolutionary debate, on the history of British imperialism – and he seems to have included every bit of it in the book.

And then there’s the characterisation and dialogue, which is unbelievably clunky and unconvincing. I’m sure Darwin and Fitzroy did have long conversations about evolution but I can’t believe they both kept to fixed, unchanging positions: the same argument is repeated again and again, and it’s particularly dull if you happen to know the answer (which, surely most readers would) to the question of why different countries are inhabited by different species.

I consulted the reviews from the time of publication, and discovered that Ruth Padel wrote in The Times that This Thing of Darkness “doesn’t work as a novel”. That was exactly my view. But I’m still mystified as to what everyone else saw in it.