DURING THE WAR IN Yugoslavia I was working with a celebrated press photographer, covering refugees arriving by ferry. As mothers with fraught, lined faces carried toddlers down the gangplank, he performed an act of kind-hearted humanity: he shoved bags of sweeties into their tiny hands.

Then he snatched them away again. As the children opened their mouths to bawl in disappointed misery, he began snapping. Let me give you the photographer's logic: these children had their lives already ruined — it had just momentarily slipped their minds. He was restoring the image of reality, not distorting it.

That is, of course, not so much an answer as a question, one teased to an excruciating exposition by Spain's most polished exponent of intelligent popular fiction, Arturo Pérez-Reverte in his new novel, The Painter of Battles.

The character of the title is Andrés Faulques, a hermit who spends his time painting a colossal battle scene on the interior of a watchtower. Faulques was once a war photographer, famed for his ability to capture in a single image horror, beauty and geometry. One day he has a visitor, the subject of one of Faulques's most celebrated shots: a weary Croatian soldier in the hour of dejected defeat.

The photograph helped to change Faulques's life, winning an award. It also changed the soldier's: its publication and his identification as the husband of a young woman sheltering in a Serbian village saw her raped and then, along with his son, tortured and murdered. Now he has come to pay Faulques back.

What follows is a game of mental chess, an excursion into art, history and imagination, and both men's lives as Faulques realises that only the continuation of their discourse, and his painting, is keeping him alive.

It is a dance to the death. For all of us. Pérez-Reverte is an accomplished writer. This is his best book yet, and the best thing I have read all year.

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Weidenfeld, £12.99; 288pp

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