"Lord, what a runner after good things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie!"

When Saul Bellow named his 1953 novel 'The Adventures Of Augie March', it could have been regarded as rather uninspiring and unimaginative. As it is, though, "adventures" is exactly the right word.

Firmly part of the tradition of picaresque tradition, the novel follows the malleable Augie through countless romantic entanglements, mishaps and sticky situations as he flits and tumbles from job to job, continually falling under the influence of women and characters like his friends Frazer and Clem Tambow, Einhorn his first employer and his brother Simon who "persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage".

Published four years before Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road', 'The Adventures Of Augie March' conveys the same sense of restlessness and rootlessness - as Augie comments in a narrative aside, "since I have never had any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still". Though this is not manifested in the same literal compulsion to travel that grips Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, Augie is, like them, someone who is always moving on to something new, as his friend Kayo Obermark points out by quoting from a French poem: "Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-la seuls qui partent / Pour partir; coeurs legers, semblable aux ballons, / De leur fatalite jamais ils ne s’ecartent, / Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons!"

The sense that Augie's life is built upon continually shifting sands contributes to an unpredictability of plot that keeps the reader engrossed, the narrative incorporating everything from book stealing and union politics to dog-washing and a cowardly eagle called Caligula. Our hero might marry, and happily so, but this is no standard comedy and the story does not come to an end - there's still time for husband and wife to be parted, and for Augie to survive for days at sea in a lifeboat in the company of a crackpot pseudo-scientist called Basteshaw after their naval vessel is torpedoed.

Bellow's writing is extraordinarily thick with detail and populated by a colourful array of grotesques and incidents which seem far too richly drawn to be passed over with such speed and then left behind.

Life is a series of trials for Augie - "If I could have come back and started to lead a happy, peaceful life I think very few people would have the right to complain that I wasn’t ready yet or hadn’t paid the admission price that’s set by whoever sets prices", he observes towards the end of the book - but the novel itself is by contrast a pleasure.