FICTION: The Secret History of CostaguanaBy Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean Bloomsbury, 309pp. £16.99

IT’S UNFAIR, but any author’s name and birthright carry baggage. Jack Kerouac couldn’t have been anything but a Beat, Franz Kafka a gloomy eastern European allegorist, Mailer a beefy American heavyweight, McCabe a master of the midlands macabre.

In his second English- translated novel, the Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez aggressively shrugs off the mantle of magic realism, an albatross-sized legacy that for any Latin American writer still weighs as heavily as Joyce’s does in these parts.

“Calm yourself,” his narrator reassures us, “this is not one of those books where the dead speak, or where beautiful women ascend into the sky, or priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion.”

He's not kidding. The Secret History of Costaguanais, in a nutshell, a historical novel narrated by the invisible source behind Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. José Altamirano, a Colombian exile living in London in 1903, helps the Polish writer rescue his tale of mining corruption in the fictional Republic of Costaguana by telling Conrad his life story and providing vital anecdotal lifeblood for the book. But when Nostromois serialised, the Colombian expat is incensed to learn that Conrad has appropriated the stuff of his life and times yet erased his essential identity from the story. Never trust a writer, especially a great one.

Here your reviewer must declare his prejudices. Novels about novelists usually send me running for the nearest Elmore Leonard. The modern book emporium can sometimes resemble a Borgesian library whose shelves are crammed with historical/ literary parlour games and academic research projects masquerading as fiction. Perhaps the quills’n’frills’n’bellyaches period piece possesses some sort of preppy respectability or affords a fast track to the magic land of the literary prize, but when a novelist resorts to writing about long-dead proponents of his own trade the weary reader often wishes someone would set off a fire extinguisher and force our musty scribe out of the drawing room to mix with some real people.

With this in mind I approached Vasquez with caution: the bio states that he studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne and has translated Forster and Hugo into Spanish. Furthermore, this novel is the product of years spent immersed in Conrad’s work (labours that have already yielded a non-fiction study).

But relax: Vasquez knows how to spin a yarn. The Secret History of Costaguanais an epic tale of the personal and political compressed into a 300-page book. That compression is crucial: the novel's trajectory is swift but never rushed. It helps that Vasquez's style is as fluid as a river, and changes speed just as fluently, disgorging vast tracts of Colombian backstory without the lumps, invoking the Angel of History and the Gorgon of Politics.

“I do not know who first compared history to the theatre . . .” he writes, “but one thing is sure: that lucid soul was not aware of the tragicomic nature of our Colombian scenario, created by mediocre dramatists, fabricated by sloppy set designers, produced by unscrupulous impresarios. Colombia is a play in five acts that someone tried to write in classical verse but that came out composed of the most vulgar prose, performed by actors with exaggerated gestures and terrible diction.”

Altamirano’s narrative voice, despite an intermittent weakness for playing footsie with the reader – “I hear the questions clamouring from the stalls: what can a famous novelist have in common with a poor, anonymous, exiled Colombian? Readers: have patience” – eschews postmodern cleverality in favour of a sarky style not a million miles from a Latin American Twain.

His tone is wise, weathered, sardonic and often irreverent, as capable of poking fun at Conrad’s anal abscesses as it is delineating the complex political machinations of his homeland. The many dramatic set pieces are beautifully envisioned – an attempt on his father’s life in a church, a widow’s attempt to drown herself in a canal, the elliptical tale of a revolutionary’s desertion that is to have a catastrophic impact on his life – and his accounts of the bloody coups, revolutions and counter-revolutions that comprised the War of a Thousand Days are searingly visceral: “The smell of death penetrated the nostrils of men too young to recognise it or to know why their mucous membranes were stinging or why it wouldn’t go away even when they rubbed gunpowder into their moustaches. Wounded revolutionaries fled down the Torcoroma trail, and collapsed like milestones along the escape route, so one could easily have kept track of their fate simply by observing the flight paths of the vultures.”

The Secret History of Costaguana, with its numerous digressions and temporal shifts, is a story that is almost impossible to synopsise, yet Vasquez weaves the vines of his narratives with confidence. The reader, reassured, follows him willingly into the jungle.

Peter Murphy is a novelist and journalist. His first novel , John the Revelator, is published by Faber and Faber