You don't often encounter verse fiction nowadays. Yet for more than 600 years it was central to our culture. Ballads and burlesques, epics, romances, sagas, satires, fables and phantasmagorias displayed the genre's vitality and variety. Within it, masterpieces blossomed: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Venus and Adonis, Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Eve of St Agnes, Don Juan, The Idylls of the King, The Ring and the Book. Then, in the 20th century, verse storytelling wilted, only occasionally cropping up to impressive effect: Vikram Seth's pleasurable sonnet-sequence novel about yuppies in California, The Golden Gate (1986), Craig Raine's sizzling family and European retrospect in three-line stanzas, History: The Home Movie (1994).

Adam Foulds's verse novella, The Broken Word, is a further dazzling exhibition of what we've been missing. Largely set in 1950s Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, it focuses on Tom, just returned to his family's East African farm after leaving public school in England and before going up to Cambridge. Rapidly, he becomes entangled in carnage. Mau Mau rebels butcher the white settlers occupying their land (and the Kikuyu who stay loyal to them). The British retaliate with barbarities of their own: ferocious reprisals, detention camps, beatings, torture, slaughter.

Tom's immersion in this bloodbath seems a long way from the world of Foulds's first book, The Truth About These Strange Times (2007), a buoyantly hilarious novel about a podgy Scottish loser teamed up with a child prodigy. But, besides the shared flair of the writing, there's a noticeable parallel. In both books, the older generation is seen warping and endangering the younger. It is a situation that, on a nationwide scale, was scathingly indicted by first world war poets such as Wilfred Owen. The Broken Word keeps putting you in mind of his work. As in Owen's caustic pared-down narrative S.I.W., patriotic and parental pressures push a young man into militarised squalor and breakdown; blithe female unawareness of the horrors men can't bring themselves to talk about compounds the nightmare.

With its grim subject matter, The Broken Word could have been a depressing read. In fact, it's an exhilarating tour de force. Its 33-year-old author moves around territory that is half a century and thousands of miles away from him with uncanny accomplishment. Place and period are conjured up as confidently as if he had been there. In the East Highlands Country Club, colonists in creaking leather armchairs grumble through drifts of cigar smoke about MMBA (“Miles and miles of bloody Africa”). Outside sprawl dangerous “lion-coloured slums/ with their cattery stink”.

Verbs are memorably mobilised to help Foulds catch the look of things: Africans “posting themselves,/third class, into the train windows or dropping/carefully onto wide unfeeling feet”; a white-robed waiter in a dining car who, as the carriage lurches, “levelled himself/naturally as a glass of water”. Wittily deft metaphor is attached to keen observation. A reactionary colonial cove has “a tweed moustache:/threads of ginger brown and white”. Foulds's vision can be microscopically lucid: as Tom brushes past rain-drenched coffee bushes, droplets spilt on to his sleeve are “little bubble lenses/that amplified the weave/then broke, darkening in”.

Speech is captured with similar high fidelity. Hunting and sporting imagery makes the British feel more at home with outrages they are perpetrating. Stiff-upper-lip understatement plays its part, too (“It hasn't been... entirely quiet”, “Chaps got a bit worked up,/ actually, sort of let them/have it somewhat”). Among the colonials, euphemism reigns. A mother furious at her son's defection is “just a little concerned... About you just giving up like this”. An elderly homosexual couple, whose ghastly hacking to death by their servants' pangas is unforgettably rendered, are “the two old boys who dine together”.

Just once Foulds underlines a point (“So Tom's father offered Tom,/ offered him up...”). The slight jolt this causes is a tribute to the control that, everywhere else, lets people and events, scenes and situations speak for themselves. When Tom shoots a man down at close quarters, he registers that his victim's fall backwards isn't as in westerns he's seen, but “looser and ugly, spastic, almost embarrassing”.

What Foulds brings to the portrayal of violence and terror is the elegance of accuracy combined with emotional power and imaginative finesse. It makes his book - concise and precise, attentive and inventive - a superlative achievement.

The Broken Word by Adam Foulds
Cape £9 pp63

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