Yet when he searches the body of the African, who is Elias, the man revives enough to speak, and speaks in Russian. He tells of a train “tracking through an endless forest in winter”, of “the feel of a woman’s hand in the icy darkness”, and a place in Siberia that offers “one sure refuge”. At the heart of this novel lies the thoroughly romantic, and indeed simple, notion and that “it was love that made the world matter, without which we should be no more than insects”. Take away the counter-examples — the rape, prostitution, mutilation, voyeurism — and this might not sound amiss in the pages of Patience Strong.

Makine does, in this novel, skirt close to the edges of sentimentality. It is rescued in part because the sections describing the romance in Russia, where Elias meets his true love, Anna, are charged with the lyricism at which Makine excels, and which depends on a heightened sense of the fleeting and fragile (the smell of snow on Anna’s coat becomes an iconic moment for Elias).

Makine is brilliant at evoking Elias’s loneliness and vulnerability as a black man on the snowy streets of Moscow, and the vividly disorientating violence of a racist attack from which he is rescued by Anna. If love is an altered state of consciousness, Makine is superb at evoking its “hallucinatory sharpness”, when the sight of one particular coat can alter even a gloomy cloakroom full of “bristling coat-hooks”. Their love gains intensity in the snowy wastes of Siberia. (It is notable that Elias never remembers with nostalgia the landscape, light or weather of his own native land, but only Makine’s.)