Century: London 1998, 307pp, £16.99 in UK

The Grail has fascinated thinking people since the beginning of time. We have all heard of the Crusades, of the many supposedly valid relics of Christ that have survived: the chalice he used at the Last Supper; the one in which Joseph of Arimathea is said to have collected drops of his blood at the Crucifixion; the shroud in which his dead body was wrapped. And then, of course, the Grail is so much more than mere physical relics: it is a personal quest that is undertaken by people in search of transcendence.

Sinclair begins his work in a very positive manner - as far as I am concerned at any rate - by stating: "The quest for the Grail is the parable of all our lonely looking for the divine." I would have wanted the subsequent pages to pursue this line of approach. Instead, we are brought through the history of the legends associated with the Grail, the trails that were followed to its centres all over the world, its treatment in literature and myth.

There is much repetition, not enough real historical basis to many of the theories put forward. Ultimately the reader is left still hungry and largely dissatisfied about what has been revealed to him or her about this fascinating subject.

Sinclair has obviously been down this road before with his work, The Sword And The Grail. I could be cynical and state that he spotted the potential market for this type of subject. As more and more people become disillusioned with the organised churches, there has in recent decades been a fascination with various cults and a search for transcendence by any means available, often through entering into a personal relationship with God. That being the case, there will be many who will buy this book because of its enticing title, a title that immediately struck me as being somewhat paradoxical. I mean, how can anyone ever claim to have discovered the Grail? The search is what matters. The object of the search, being of divine origin, is not comprehensible in human terms and thus cannot be beheld by mere mortals.

Sinclair's undertaking was far too ambitious. He and his readers would have been better served had he not attempted to cover such a huge number of topics. France, Spain, Germany, Italy all have a rich history of the Grail, not to talk of the myths associated with Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. An account such as the one we are offered by Sinclair can only thus be sketchy, if not downright superficial. There is only a limited amount you can say in so few pages on such a vast subject.

I also feel that the author is not a gifted historian. We too often come across repetition and the chronology is not consistent. The references to the literature associated with the Grail are also glossed over in too little detail. Milton, Spencer, Scott, Byron, Blake, Cervantes, Ariosto, Malory - to mention but a few - all wrote about the Grail and cannot be dealt with in such a cursory manner. And then the issues of myth and religion, of truth and fiction, are never properly grappled with.

This is a pity because there were times when I believed he was beginning to plough a rich vein. Like when he asks "What is the Grail?" on page 100. He replies that the search for its discovery is a personal quest. He continues:

"Yet the markers along the way are enigmatic . . . Rather as the Stations of the Cross can only be symbols of the truth of the Passion, so the pointers to the Grail may only suggest a path to a beatific vision of its manifestation. Each finder discovers a unique insight into the divine."

This is the type of treatment the subject deserved but such examples are far too rare and not always so insightful. Far more commonplace are the sweeping statement and the refusal to try to come to grips with what is, I agree, a complex subject, but one that will never lose its tantalising freshness and its imperviousness to scientific analysis. My reservations will not in all likelihood prevent The Discovery Of The Grail from being a commercial success, but is not that in itself a betrayal of its subject matter?

Dr Eamon Maher is a lecturer in French in the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin