Fate, recognition, and déjà vu are recurring motifs, or as Krüger, a failed scholar and habitué of Otto Kessler’s Coffee House, puts it, ‘the inevitability of passing through where all and one have already been before and, in fact, must and will be, forever’. At Kessler’s, his philosophy of time is not well received, though his idea of love as recognition does stick in the mind of young Johannes Meyer, the Candide of this swashbuckling romp through the nineteenth century.

Beatrice Reiss serves at Kessler’s, where the handsome, eighteen-year-old Johannes and his friends gather to carouse and spout their favourite poetry. She is one of the numerous supporting cast who make a brief appearance, then disappear. Johannes and Beatrice are in the crowd on Unter den Linden waiting to greet the famous emperor. So is Marie-Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. None of them catches a glimpse of Napoleon, but Beatrice sidles up to Johannes and leads him to a couch. This marks the beginning of his long, eventful life.

Beatrice also works for Claus von Rolt, a collector of antiquities and exotica, and a thoroughly nasty type. As Beyle passes von Rolt’s house, he hears the unmistakable sounds of passion and can’t help but press his face to the window glass. He will not soon forget the thrill of watching Johannes and Beatrice making love. When he hears the approach of another passer-by, Beyle scurries off and out of the story. But his odd behaviour piques the interest of seventeen-year-old Elizabeth von Hoffman. She looks through the glass and locks eyes with Johannes. In that rare moment, ‘it was as though [Elizabeth] could see everything that was inside the boy. And he saw her too (she knew it!) and together they confirmed something they’d always known but only now remembered.’ Thus, their twinned destinies are sealed.

Beatrice leaves and Johannes is caught unawares by the unexpected return of von Rolt with the American trader Wesley Lewis Jr and his companion, Mr Hendrik. Surprised, Johannes drops a seashell from von Rolt’s collection of rarities and flees the scene. Mr Hendrik allows him to escape, but Johannes is arrested soon after and forced to join the 4e Régiment Étrangers. ‘Book One’ concludes its breakneck trajectory on page thirty-three and the gods take ‘a well-deserved afternoon nap’.

I must not thwart the pleasures of anticipation and revelation with too much detail. Suffice to say, ‘suffering is only a small part of the truth’ as we follow Johannes with the Grande Armée to Posen, Warsaw, and beyond. Elsewhere, Krüger throws in his lot with the virulent Lewis Jr and Mr Hendrik; Elizabeth escapes her stultifying existence in Berlin; and Napoleon endures the indignities of life on Elba.

Fortunes wax and wane with equal speed in the ten remaining books. From London to the Canary Islands to Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town and Port Jackson, through a string of ports, the various strands of Fortune drift together like tides sweeping drowned sailors to unfriendly shores. The culminating coincidence would be ridiculous in any novel with pretensions to realism, which Fortune emphatically is not. ‘Sometimes believing is enough to make things true,’ says Krüger (the most quotable character), as if he were speaking of the art of reading.

‘Our lives don’t actually go anywhere. We are always here, wherever we are,’ says Krüger, again unintentionally invoking the vicarious joys of fiction and standing in as the mouthpiece of the author, whose rigorous pace has taken us from 1806 to 1834 by the conclusion of ‘Book Nine’. In a coda of sorts, Books Ten and Eleven catapult us to 1915 Tasmania and World War I. The end of Bartulin’s grand, rollicking adventure, while not exactly dissatisfying, is insistently dour and perhaps a tad too neat. I would have preferred the ambiguity of unresolved genealogy.