Howard Jacobson’s gifts as a novelist of the first rank, not just in England but in English, are well known. He is a master of the language, whose piercing eye makes him the most excoriating as well as the wittiest of writers. Equally to the point, he is one of that small group of authors whose superiority to the average seems to put him well beyond the competence of Booker and Whitbread judges; it is as if winning any such prize would be a diminution of his stature, for he is in a different league, and this novel proves it.

The thread of the novel is its narrator’s effort to discover why a childhood friend from their Manchester Jewish community has murdered his parents by gassing them. By itself this theme is enough to jerk one’s attention to the highest pitch — consider the two awful impossibilities it combines: Jewish parenticide, and by gassing — but of course there can be no addressing such a theme without also addressing what presses behind it, namely, Jewish history’s 5,000 years of bitterness. Comprehending so speaking an individual Jewish tragedy has to involve comprehending the tragedy of the Jews — in both senses of comprehend — and that is what Jacobson essays here.

“Five thousand years of bitterness” is what the narrator, a professional cartoonist and refugee from the self-made shtetl of Manchester immigrant Jews, calls his magnum opus, a graphic (again, in both senses) history of his people. He had started it with his Orthodox Jewish friend, the later murderer, when they were at school together and first grappling with the fact of Jewish besiegement. Genius sees the universal and the particular in each other, and Jacobson’s genius leads him to anatomise the terrible relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the narrator’s unsuccessful (and wickedly funny) marriages to Gentile women, and in the spindle on which the murder turns, another attempt to bridge that fraught divide.

This is a novel of debate, and it is extraordinary how Jacobson achieves every point of view, every possible nuance of attack and defence on the question of the essence of Jewishness — its endurance, the implacable enmities it has suffered, its self-inflicted wounds and obsessions, its unutterable sorrows. The two main characters, the narrator and the murderer, are beautifully rendered, revealed little by little, the first in the warmth and tenderness that underlies his wit and his capacity for long-suffering, the second in the weird wisdom that underlies his actual and assumed half-madness-half- autism that allows him to escape questioning and therefore, until the last page, comprehension.

The other characters — the narrator’s mother (who is endlessly playing the card game kalooki), his atheist socialist father, the harrowing figure of the murderer’s brother who brings his family to the gas chamber by loving a shikseh (non-Jewish girl), the narrator’s ghastly wives and the even more ghastly mother-in-law of one of them, and others – are gems. Do not be fooled by the luminous intelligence they all display, which would make a hasty reader reduce them to Jacobson mouthpieces in the breathless whirl of debate that is the story itself: they are true individuals, created in needlepoint with a touch too deft to notice, as in all art.

This is, among many other things, a detective story, too, a mystery tale, which moves to its denouement in infinitely measured and achingly suspenseful steps. The canvas is broad: Manchester, Israel, the shtetls of the old diaspora, the concentration camp where Ilse Koch notoriously whipped the penises of naked Jews and where one of them, Mendel, loved her for it. There is no escaping painful truths here.

On this canvas appears a picture: a portrait, in a murderer’s face, of 5,000 years of bitterness. It is, to repeat and to repeat plainly, a work of genius.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy