Little, Brown £14.99 pp307

For his third novel, Christopher Wilson ventures beyond his usual one-word titles, implying, perhaps, that we are in for a narrative as transparent as a traditional ballad. However, his creation of heroes with exceptional talents (a perfect memory in Blueglass and effortless mimicry in Mischief) means that this story is more than it seems. Under events that move with the surreal speed of a Wes Anderson film, complex issues about social and personal identity are explored.

Lee Cotton couldn’t have had a more surprising life. As he was born white to a black Southern mother and an Icelandic father, his childhood negotiates a tricky social path in 1950s pre-civil rights America. When he is perplexed about whether he should sit at the back of the bus (with black people) or at the front (with whites), his pragmatic Mama advises him, “best walk”.

Pragmatism is one of the clues to Lee’s ability to survive a life of shape shifting, along with the voices he hears — dead people, the unspoken thoughts of others — and, later, the ability to see into the future. Despite his white skin, he is viciously attacked by a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser; he recovers with even greater psychic powers and an extended IQ. Another disaster precipitates a state-of-the-art sex change, leaving him to be reborn as a woman. A full house: race, class and gender are the social triumvirate within which Lee has to define himself. As in any good ballad, there is a refrain: a message about the dangers of judging by appearances, and Lee’s own assertion that no matter what happens to his body, he is still the same “person”.

Wilson deflects any risks of nature v nurture polemic by having Lee tell his story in an absorbing, mercurial prose, blending the rhythms of a J D Salinger or a Mark Twain with a poetic literacy explained by Lee’s supernatural powers. The America of the 1950s and 1960s is revisited with the insights of the 1990s, leaving us with a fairy tale for our own times: part allegory, part social satire, and, like all good fairy tales, with an apocalyptic ending.

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