For Antoni Jach, in his latest novel, Travelling Companions, the strange yet simple question ‘Did the bird talk dirty?’ becomes the loose thread from which centuries of European thought threatens to unravel. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel could have easily come undone, but Jach performs his magic masterfully. Drawing on Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it takes the form of a travelogue in which the tales of wanderers are embedded. The novel introduces itself as a meditation on the effect of solitary travel on one’s identity:

It’s time to try on multiple selves; so much easier to do when you travel – especially when you are speaking a foreign language and nobody knows who you are, or who you have become. At certain times it is desirable to be alone … At other times you have to be in company; you desperately need travelling companions to reflect yourself back to yourself.

Our nameless narrator arrives in Córdoba on 2 November 1999, and soon strikes up a friendship with two American tourists in a wine bar. They talk, as travellers do, about their lives back home and their plans for the rest of the journey. The narrator, meanwhile, is someone who prefers to listen rather than talk: an Isherwood-like character, shutter open, not thinking, merely recording. On the off chance, however, that Isherwood’s witness–narrator does spring to the reader’s mind, Jach’s protagonist soon reveals that he didn’t even bring a camera. Instead, he carries a tape recorder to capture the sounds around him as he pursues his Faustian quest for knowledge of the human condition.

The wheel of fortune looms large over both our hero and the narrative. Chance encounters spur new adventures, new relationships, new stories. Before long – like a wheel within a wheel – the travellers’ tales reflect and refract through one another and the readers find themselves tilting at the windmills of their own minds. It is from this tilting that Jach’s monstrous creation gathers momentum.

While the narrator’s cheery tone and Jach’s ostensibly simple prose put the reader initially at ease, Travelling Companions soon ventures into dangerous, unexpected territories. Irritations send us searching for flaws, and once Jach has us in that mindset we find them easily enough. This novel takes us to some of Europe’s great cities but shows little more than postcards. References to terrorists, refugees, and Australia’s treatment of its First Nations peoples feel somewhat anachronistic, more 2021 than 1999. What could have been an echo of José Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio – traditionally performed in Spain on All Saint’s Day – might not ring true after all. The plot feels more like an itinerary. In fact, as one pretentious character remarks of Chekhov’s stories: ‘Nothing much happens, the characters are often boring … and when they are not philosophising they have nothing much to say to each other except everyday things.’

It becomes infuriating. Figures initially excused as archetypes topple over into vacuous, disdainful stereotypes. The pages fill with hysterical women. Clichés abound. Americans are loud and obnoxious. Poles are vodka-soaked. Italians are sleazy. Frenchmen are sleazy. Moroccans are sleazy. Lucky our narrator – a kind, fatherly, educated white man – is there to help the little women, offering a shoulder to sleep on and a guiding hand around an art gallery.

The reader’s ire slips from the page towards the author himself. Jach is clearly an erudite man: surely, we think, he must know better. Surely. And so we keep reading, wondering who on earth he was writing for. Jach does, however, have a certain reader in mind, a reader he knows intimately.

A failed attempt to cross the French-Spanish border at Portbou recalls – for Jach’s ‘ideal’ reader – the final days of Walter Benjamin, whose ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and notion of the aura in art offer a useful lens through which to view it. But familiarity with such works is not a prerequisite to engage with the novel, and any smugness or pride the reader may experience at picking up on such references does not go unpunished by Jach.

Further reading – or a cheeky googling – is simultaneously rewarded and condemned. What emerges from Travelling Companions is both a rhetoric of innocence and an admission of guilt for reader and author alike. This is pure carnival: no footlights separate the audience from the action.

Like the priest with the alchemist in the Yeoman’s story in The Canterbury Tales – like the corporate raider in the novel who falls for the parrot she is minding – I fell for Travelling Companions. It was a sublime pleasure, and, yes, I wished it would never end. It’s banal to say great art makes you think, and it’s barbaric after Auschwitz to think of banality and not also think of evil. Is that observation itself a banality? Is banality the true evil, or is evil simply evil and banality banal? Is In the Army Now actually a homophobic, xenophobic, unfunny comedy? Was I offended by the dirty-talking bird? Is it hot in Chad?