This brief love affair ends. Elias leaves for the revolutionary front; Anna marries an up-and-coming diplomat. But Elias’s memories of Anna will remain the touchstone of his life.It is here that the novel suffers. In other novels, Makine explores the ambiguities of obsession — of how waiting may warp in the absence even of hope; of how perpetually ­rewoven memories of love may become an end in themselves, not an outward-directed emotion; and of the borderline between hopeless love and delusion.

Human Love is full of explorations of ideas about obsession, and images of mindless repetition. The revolutionary training exercises involve mind-numbing repetition, designed to detach brutal techniques from their ends, so that even torture will be performed as a move in a game where the players are “hypnotised by the marquetry of their own chessboards”. And the victims of this mindless violence take refuge in mindless rituals.

But we are not allowed to wonder if Elias’s talismanic fingering of his gleaming memories of love might be delusional. The possibility is introduced that Anna does not remain worthy of his love. As a diplomat’s wife, she becomes like a “big smiling doll”, trapped like a “clockwork toy” in her “constructed” life; but then she is shown to be inwardly true.

For Makine, love will change the world — though only, in true romantic fashion, “hopeless” love. If Elias had married Anna, he says at one point, he too would have become a “fat Angolan apparatchik … opening accounts in the West”. As it is, his love keeps him an “Angolan Robespierre”, moving untouched and uncorrupted through the corrupt post-revolutionary regimes – and as much of a cipher as any conventional figure of the “noble savage”.