“Nothing” opines the narrator in Howard Jacobson's new novel, “that bears on sex should surprise us.” That being indubitably true does not mean that we may not be repelled, or that most male readers, invited to accept that “all men secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them” will not rise in outraged unison to deny the highly suspect premise. Yet Felix Quinn is not most men. In this anti-hero, Jacobson has created a disturbed, amoral creature as worthy of pity as of outrage. That the female reader does not end up loathing him is this novel's true surprise - and final triumph.

The Act of Love is about obsession. It is also about performance, theatricality, artifice. If the act of love implies sexual intercourse, the word “act” is also redolent of dramatic structure, of stagecraft. And to “act” as if you love, while being unable to feel - as Quinn is incapable of feeling in any way that acknowledges the humanity of the other - is a very dangerous game indeed. All these layers are woven into a gloriously literary, highly wrought narrative as darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written. I kept imagining the novel filmed by Greenaway or interpreted by Kubrick in the manner of Eyes Wide Shut. Like that movie, The Act of Love pushes out boundaries and escorts us - complicit voyeurs, like all consumers of art - into places we would rather not go and yet ultimately reaffirms the primacy of conventional moral ity. Generous, reciprocal love is felt all the more powerfully in absentia.

Felix Quinn is an antiquar-ian book dealer, who steals another man's wife, Marisa, and marries her. We only ever know Marisa through Quinn's unreliable narrative; therefore she remains enigmatic - “a beauty who was also a moral philosopher” whose ideal gift might be “the dialogues of Plato and underwear”. She is never real to us because she is allowed life only within “the torture garden of [his] own disordered nature”. This comes within a whisker of being the novel's chief flaw yet Jacobson redeems it by virtue of style. If Marisa wears a mask it is because her creator intends her to - and it is as erotic an accessory as fur handcuffs or a pearl necklace upon nakedness.

While on honeymoon Mar-isa falls ill, and calling the hotel's Cuban doctor in, Quinn observes that his hands linger too long on her breasts (a shade of Angela Carter in his “silken-furred fingers”) whereupon most men would have knocked him down on the spot.

But Quinn is inflamed and set upon the rack - longing for that moment to be repeated, so that he might suffer masochistic torments of the most exquisite jealousy. The damaged child who suffered rejection becomes the willing victim of the wife he has dehumanised. When Quinn meets the mysterious and satanic Marius at the funeral of the man he in turn once cuckolded (there's a lot of it about) he selects him to be his wife's lover and sets them up.

Thus the stage is set for tragedy, with little of Jacobson's renowned comic writing to light the murky way. His mordant wit flays the unbelievable into an uncomfortably recognisable shape. Not one character remains uninjured, but then it's all their own fault, we think, returning with relief to life beyond a seductive narrative that forces you to be part of its compulsions. Jacobson is a connoisseur of the harm that lovers inflict on each other: he rolls their recriminations on his tongue, savours the bile, relishes the sticky sweetness of passion, and tastes the salty tears that can never quench the perpetual thirst for love. With eyes wide open he holds a mirror to the darkest aspects of the soul and suggests that instead of turning away we question our subservience to ancient, savage gods. And then - maybe - vanquish them?

The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape, £17.99; 320pp Buy the book here

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