Bloomsbury £15.99 pp188

At 80, Russell Hoban remains one of our most unpredictable and idiosyncratic novelists. Come Dance with Me has a clear narrative line and is highly readable — but it suddenly and repeatedly trips the reader up. We are in convergence-of-the-twain territory here, where two people who seem to have no connection are ineluctably drawn towards each other. The novel is arranged like a cantata for alternating voices: Christabel Alderton, a well-preserved rock chick in her fifties, and Elias Newman, a doctor in his sixties who specialises in diabetes. This unlikely couple meets at an exhibition of symbolist paintings at the Royal Academy in London. “Komm tanze mit mir!” Christabel commands Elias, thus providing the novel with its title.

The line is taken from a German ballad, where it is spoken by the Erlking’s daughter to a bridegroom distributing wedding invitations. The dance she is proposing is a dance of death, and the words pop out of Christabel’s mouth without her thinking. They are, however, appropriate because Christabel is an unwitting femme fatale. Or, as she would put it, drawing upon the music she performs, she’s a “bad-luck woman” — particularly for the men in her life, who tend to suffer premature deaths. In one of the many coincidences that characterise the book, it emerges that Elias’s mother was brought up on the Weser among the alders and birches that are the Erlking’s domain, and would often sing this ballad to her son. Somewhat surprisingly, Elias finds himself falling in love with Christabel, eventually pursuing her to Hawaii.

This distinctly odd but oddly beguiling novel is much preoccupied with death, and at times the theme is rather too insistently sounded. Elias’s mother once found a corpse in Teufelsmoor — that of a man who turns out to have a connection with Christabel; another character serves no function in the narrative except that he is a painter specialising in images of Death and the Maiden; Christabel’s group go into a Madonna-like huddle and invoke Anubis, the Egyptian equivalent of Charon, before each gig, and their show starts with them emerging from mortuary drawers; even a dead bat falls out of the sky at Christabel’s feet. This last incident appears to be prompted less by the demands of plot than by the author’s laudable hope that his readers will be inspired to support the Cornwall Bat Hospital.

What Hoban does well is to evoke the creepy world of German ballads and highlight the way that artists are often obsessed by death. And there are some nice oldie jokes: a wonderful catalogue of the various ills suffered by the members of Christabel’s ageing and decrepit band suggests just how appropriate the name Mobile Mortuary has become.

Hoban’s London is geographically particular, but at the same time fantastical. An author’s note unnecessarily assures us: “The Daniel Mendoza and Coffee As You Like It are fictional.” The former is a pub in which beer from the Jewish breweries of Maccabee and Masada is served by barmen in yarmulkes, while the latter is a coffee bar where waitresses in doublet and hose provide beverages in mugs inscribed with Shakespearian quotations. As with the stray voices that keep interrupting Christabel and Elias’s duet, or the global optimism prompted by a bottle of tomato ketchup, readers may be charmed by this sort of thing or find it all too whimsical.

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