In 1860, so Andrew Crumey tells us, a man named James Deuchar waded into a river to save two children from drowning, at the cost of his own life. This novel is about that, but it’s about everything that isn’t that as well. Specifically, it’s about Robbie Coyle, a young boy living in the Scottish town of Kenzie in the early 1970s. He has an active imagination, and in this era there’s a lot going on to fuel it, such as the Apollo missions, Doctor Who, Horizon documentaries and books about the theory of relativity. More than anything, Robbie wants to go into space, but as a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut, as he’s been persuaded by his staunchly socialist father that the USSR is far superior to the corrupt, imperialistic USA.

So far, so retro. But then Sputnik Caledonia goes in an unexpected, Lanark-like direction: we turn the page to find a novel within a novel, in which the imagery, characters and themes we’ve been introduced to are re-shaped and re-inserted into the story of a different Robbie Coyle. This version of Robbie is 19 and lives in a Britain which has been a Communist country since 1945. Having volunteered for a top-secret space mission, he’s come to a sealed-off community called the Installation for training. A classified military base in a Communist state, the Installation is a nexus of power games and paranoia, its scientific programme run by the decidedly odd Professor Kaupff, a former German rocket scientist with a mystical bent, eccentric ideas about sexual energy, and a belief that scientists must be schooled in the arts and philosophy if they are to fulfil their potential.

The final section gives the themes yet another twist, showing us Robbie’s father in old age, a defeated man whose socialism has collapsed into a web of conspiracy theories, plus two new characters who may or may not be Robbie returning to Earth in different guises.

Sputnik Caledonia is a wildly imaginative novel, but it’s engaging too, the early chapters of Robbie in a recognisable early-1970s Scotland sustaining our interest through all the twists it takes later on. And although Crumey doesn’t tie up all his loose ends in a conventional manner, within the bounds of the book’s own internal logic, all its pieces fit neatly together. It’s an exciting novel, experimenting with quantum realities without sacrificing the essential emotional core of a work of fiction. Professor Kaupff would surely approve.