Images, too, resonate between novels: stars seen in the water, or the “myriad luminous dots” of a distant town, from which const­ellations may be formed; a bird nursed by a child; long railway journeys through snowy wastes; the rank smell of frying fish; the act of sex seen from a riverbank, and often through a framing window. Voyeurism and rape regularly counterpoint moments of brief lyrical romance.

These are evidently private points of reference for Makine, and the temptation for reviewers has been to read too much autobiography into his fiction. Yet these recurrent motifs are more like pieces in a kaleidoscope (itself a recurrent image), shaken into new patterns in each novel.

In Human Love, there will be little temptation to read the novel as autobiography, though many of the same elements are present. The hero, Elias Almeida, is black; he is an Angolan refugee, who trains in Russia to become a “professional revolutionary”; his life is pieced together by an unnamed narrator.

The novel is about love, but starts with a horrific rape in the first chapter, and an act of sexual voyeurism in the second. It begins on the frontier between Angola and Zaire, where the narrator and his colleague, a Soviet military instructor, are imprisoned in a hut. On the floor of the hut is an African in a suit, whom they take to be a corpse. Through a window, the narrator, expecting at any moment to be killed, can see his captors violating a peasant woman: this “reduction of life to no more than pleasure and death” makes humanity seem no more than “insects”.