This extremely wintry and hard-hitting adventure story is set in provincial Russia. Most of the action takes place at the end of the Great War and in a large snow-covered country house near Smolensk. The Tsar has abdicated and the ‘fabulous beast’ of Imperial Russia is ‘swaying’.

The narrator is a big, bold, half-likeable man called Charlie Doig, who has a Russian mother and ‘proper Russian balls that swing like the planets’. Now in his late twenties, he has already had a wild life. The sudden death of his Scottish father from the plague has inspired him to avenge himself on the Xenopsylla cheops flea responsible and driven him out on the road as a naturalist.

Charlie’s early adult life has been ‘buttered with luck’. In a post office in western Burma he has captured an unbelievably rare beetle with royal blue shoulders and greeny-bronze undercarriage which has existed for thousands of years without anyone knowing about it. From the roof of a mosque in Bokhara, he has snatched an almost equally obscure white swift. And, after months of celibacy, he has also had some phenomenal sexual encounters. In a Burmese brothel, he has taken on four women simultaneously and had a bowlful of baby eels squirted up his bottom at the same time. ‘I don’t know exactly what the little fellows were doing inside me or where they’d got to, but I recommend it.’

But now, in the winter of 1916, his momentum is faltering. Instead of going to war, he has retreated to a maternal family mansion known as the Pink House where the plot and the snow thicken and the sky becomes ‘death-coloured’. Charlie is now in love with his cousin Elizaveta, who is betrothed to a rich Pole he wishes were dead.

Told in an intimate, chatty style and in prose of great originality – and angularity – this is a historical evocation at times as powerful as the account of pre-1914 Berlin the late great Sybille Bedford gives us in A Legacy. From its opening pages onwards, the narrator shows a desperate, obsessional quality which brings out the full, bloody, sensual brutality of his situation.

And its intellectual charms. Has any author besides James Fleming pointed out ‘the ominous bundle of consonants’ contained in the word truth? Or described birds as ‘natural conversationalists’? Or God as ‘the greatest naturalist of them all’? The narrator’s naturalist’s eye or ear informs almost every paragraph of this novel. He tells us a wren is no heavier than a muscatel grape and unsqueamishly celebrates the ‘pink primed pear-drop keyhole’ of a donkey on heat. Fate, he tells us, has got him by the scruff of his neck ‘like a new born kitten’ and the walls of Elizaveta’s private rooms in the Pink House are the colour of ‘a parrot’s poll, a northern sunset’.

How the sky matters to Charlie Doig! When it is not ‘the colour of an old lion’s pelt’, it is in tatters of ‘pink and pearl, salmon and its skin’. Wandering through the garden with his beloved, he notes that the night is ‘opening up its shop’. Later on, he rails against the sun for its empty offer of warmth and happiness’ and wishes he could shoot it down.

Strong stuff – but the humans involved in this toe-tingling tale are never upstaged by the forces of nature. Items of their clothing, whether a fellow naturalist’s ‘disgusting underpants’ or the ‘green and gold brocade waistcoat’ in which a family friend is shot dead, are depicted with special zest and Charlie goes to town when describing his rich great uncle Igor’s ivory enema syringe, Astro-Daimler motor car and vast St Petersburg palace. Here is this preposterous old character’s arrival at a railway station where hundreds of miserable would-be passengers have been waiting overnight:

To my astonishment there was the tall figure of my Uncle Igor floating onto the concourse followed by his steward and two footmen, each escorting a porter with a heaped barrow of luggage. He was wearing a silk top hat; a dark, close-fitting, ankle-length overcoat; full make-up, tight black leather gloves and galoshes. Round his neck was a silver fox, in his hand a cane.

And yet this wealth of detail does not slow down the ensuing action: the assassination of Elizaveta’s fiancé and Uncle Igor in the same coach, the subsequent marriage of our hero and his heroine, the mustering of Bolsheviks in the forest near the house, the death of everyone in it, including the new wife, and our hero’s heroic attempt to get his immediate revenge on the wily individual responsible. All these head-spinning events are related with almost cinematic force and tension.

As cruel old Russia crumbles and a new hell is forged, it is often difficult to know whose side to be on. For much of the book, Charlie Doig only wants to leave his stricken mother country, get to Chicago. But does he make it? In a puzzling but unforgettable final scene, horse-drawn cabs swerve around him as he dances with an imaginary Elizaveta in the middle of the Nevsky Prospekt. And then discovers his hands are empty. This extraordinary novel may end on a sad note – ‘Goodbye love! Goodbye sorrow! Goodbye Russia!’ – but readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest living story-tellers.