A novel such as Ivo Stourton’s “The Night Climbers” (Simon Spotlight, 336 pages, $24) presents a particular challenge for its reviewer. It is, of course, the reviewer’s responsibility to read every sentence of a book that’s up for critique, but what if the book is utterly boring and every sentence is an obstacle to the blessed end? What if, in their triteness and incompetence, the sentences not only beg to be skipped but embody all the insufficiencies of the novel itself? In that case, I can tell you now, the reviewer has a very long night ahead of him.

Did I read every sentence? I did. “The Night Climbers” is narrated nostalgically by James Walker, a roughly middle-class young Brit who upon arriving at Cambridge manages to befriend a glamorous foursome of fellow students whose interests include scaling the architecture at night. He’s awed by them (“‘The Night Climbers?’ I replied, the name sending a little tremor down my spine”) and pines for their acceptance. The night climbers, James says, “were more vivid for me, more real, than anyone else I had ever met,” which is the kind of unearned abstraction a writer reaches for when he doesn’t know how to dramatize a necessary concept.

The night climbers include Lisa, a robot of a character; Michael, a “swarthy, gleaming” blowhard who calls people “chap,” and Jessica, who is “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.” Their leader, however, is the suave and charismatic Francis Manley, son of a powerful Lord. Whether Francis is fox hunting, gambling away $4 million in a few weeks, snorting coke off a Picasso in his dorm room, or just slouching around looking “like a rakish model emerging from an epic party,” his presence is a constant inspiration to those around him. Everyone who encounters the man — from professor to porter, from maître d’ to prostitute — dotes on him. Why? No, it’s not because he’s obscenely wealthy; it’s because the leisure that his obscene wealth affords has made him into glorious person. “He lived so easily … that it made his soul beautiful.” Got that?

Anyway, the plot naturally involves some shenanigans: Francis’s father cuts off the money, so the night climbers cook up a plan to net themselves millions by forging another Picasso, but of course it all gets screwed up, and there’s a dutiful threesome (“… the two of them moving together, her pale body straddling the taught cradle of his hips as I pinned her slender wrists …”) and a suicide. Most fundamentally, it’s a rip-off of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” with none of that book’s engrossing qualities or Tartt’s basic competence as a writer of prose.

In fact, it’s Mr. Stourton’s prose that really does the book in. Every sentence is overwritten, and every paragraph is five sentences too long. Adjectives swarm like houseflies. Mr. Stourton can never just state an idea or observation; he has to break its bones and force it into a lame metaphor. Call them bonsai sentences. Here, for example, he just wants to say a woman’s perfume has aroused the narrator: “The smell bypassed the border controls at the edge of my consciousness, slipping right through with its illicit cargo of associations, and I felt a warm stirring in my groin.” And here, two women have an awkward meeting in front of James: “… I could feel them in the silence clicking beads on the abacus of status. The pause gave me a brief respite, and I martialled the scattered armies of my thoughts for one final push.” Some sentences are frankly embarrassing to read: “I listened, becalmed in the lonely waters of my room.”

The other aspect of “The Night Climbers” that sinks it is Mr. Stourton’s hero-worship of Francis. The problem isn’t really the character, but the author’s relationship to the character; Mr. Stourton, via James, writes about Francis as would a trembling, overdramatic schoolboy with a crush — “In death, Francis was my virgin bride” — and tries to install him as a figure of myth. But Francis is just a disgusting brat who says such things as, “To work for a living, that would be a prison, a life sentence,” and whose great adventures always involve things like “leaving the coke out on the table when the bellboy came [and] refusing to tip him.” Stourton inevitably describes such escapades in the solemnly confessional tone of one who pretends to disapprove but in fact takes fresh pleasure in the recounting. Unsurprising, since the novel as a whole pretends that its central idea is the corrupting effect of wealth, but all it’s really about is how nice it is to be rich.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Jacques Poulin. His first novel, “Fires,” was published by Impetus Press.