There are two things in the world over which I think it is important to take great care: food and spelling. Which is why my recent trip to Jamaica was spoilt utterly in its first, tender hours by one of Britain’s most fêted living novelists.

I was 35,000 feet over the Atlantic, rushing towards the Caribbean with a grotesque Gatwick Garfunkel’s breakfast festering inside me (at £50 for three people I just don’t see why their breakfasts have to be pre-cooked hours before and served lukewarm just because it’s an airport – it’s not as if they’re in the air or anything) and had just cracked open a spanking fresh copy of Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, of whom I am a fan.

Not a slobbering, drooling, yearn-to-lick-his-naked-knees sort of fan, as I am of, say, John Updike or J.M. Coetzee (or, indeed, now that I’m thinking of the knee-licking thing, Scarlett Johansson), because he’s not that sort of writer. He’s the sort of writer who does crisp sentences, researches things thoroughly, holds off one or two big facts till the end to create a bit of suspense and sometimes notices things about the world that hadn’t occurred to me.

So I’m a usually-take-one-on-holiday sort of fan. And this time I had taken Amsterdam, which I think is the one that won the Booker Prize and at 200-odd pages was perfect for a transatlantic flight (taking into account breaks for two meals and a much-awaited Ben Affleck/Bob Hoskins vehicle showing on a screen the size of a fag packet, with a terrible crackle in one earpiece, and nothing in the other).

It begins with a woman called Molly experiencing some sort of non-specific brain degeneration. McEwan lists the words that begin to fail her as the disease grips: “parliament, chemistry, propeller”… We focus in on the words, relishing our luck in being able to grasp them fully, “bed, cream, mirror…”, McEwan selecting the words so thoughtfully for aural resonance and bourgeois mundanity: “acanthus” and then, “bresaiola…”.

Bresaiola? Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! You fool! You fool! It’s “bresaola”. There’s no “i” in it. Now I can’t read your book. Not with a spelling mistake on the first page. Not when “bresaola” is a bit of a knobby word to have chosen anyway. I thought of McEwan on a Tuscan holiday, munching on a slice of air-dried beef and saying to his host (Umberto Eco? Peter Mayle?) “Mm, this is yummy, what do you call it?” and being told “bresaola” and hearing “bresaiola”, and mouthing it to himself and planning to put it in his next book. And not bothering to look it up!

And then none of the muppets at his publisher, Vintage, looked it up either. And it was still there in what must be the tenth or eleventh reprint, maybe more.

Furthermore, I happen to know that McEwan is very close friends with Fay Maschler, the great Evening Standard restaurant critic. I’ve seen them eating together many times. Did she not tell him about “bresaola”? Surely she has read her friend’s book? Was she too polite to say? Or did she, like me, hurl it to the floor in a fury and watch old episodes of Friends until she landed in Kingston?

And then what did she eat when she got there? Because I’m buggered if I found a mouthful worth swallowing in ten days, apart from the cool Red Stripe in a stubby brown bottle that the hotel driver gave me in the car.

The hotel – I won’t name it, it’s not fair, they were nice people – was at the gag-reflex end of expensive (£500 per person per night) but turned out to be just bland international posh: aircon, wi-fi, staff in gloves, tiny private beach next door to a Sandals resort from which fat little accountants in fluorescent lifejackets set off every five minutes on screeching jet skis, yelling “yippee!” as they buzzed snorkellers.

And the food was just dire. The fish was all salmon, cod and sea bass. “Where do you get it from?” I asked the general manager. “Scotland,” he said proudly. Pleasing though it was to think my lunch and I had travelled exactly the same distance to be here (9,200 miles between us), I had noticed lots of lovely fresh fish – snappers, groupers, little seahorses that come up lovely if you batter them whole like whitebait – in the sea where I had been swimming not 20 minutes before. Did they not serve any of those?

Alas, said the manager, the fishermen bring the fish to market very early in the morning, and it goes very quickly.

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