They took advantage of the license of levity to expose frailty and mock pomposity.

Jesters purported to confront their audience with their true selves.

The raucous, rambunctious prince of that trade was Tyll Ulenspiegel, a jester said to have died of plague in 1350, first written about in 1510, and re-cast in this novel as a jaundiced wanderer during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48).

Ulenspiegel (which translates from the German as owl's mirror) was sly, slippery and seditious.

Here he inhabits a weird, devastated Europe, along with Dr Horridus, the Ship of Fools, the Winter King and other lethally quirky celebrities.

Religious faith vies with mysticism; dire curses, wolves devoid of fear and extremely shy dragons still provoke terror.

The Thirty Years' War was so relentlessly appalling that historians now ignore the conflict to focus on the eventual balance of power settlement (the Peace of Westphalia).

I think the most compelling depiction of the war remains a sadly neglected film, The Last Valley, starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif.

For its part, Tyll - shortlisted for the International Booker Prize - is consistently powerful, poignant in interludes but rigorous in its portrait of a world consumed by violence, hunger and pain: "If you're unlucky, you get killed just for the shoes."

One character discovers Macbeth, "a black play, full of fire and blood and diabolical power". So, too, is this novel. Only a weary dragon is permitted a dignified death.

Kehlmann includes only one graphic battle scene (Zusmarshausen).

His great skill (and that of his excellent translator) is to describe a macabre, horrific world in determinedly matter-of-fact language.

All the shocking events in the story are related laconically, as normal occurrences from day to day.

The novel gathers pace as Tyll's curious father is hanged for heresy, in scenes worthy of the Salem witch trials or Stalin's purges.

The son - complete with gaunt face, small eyes and buckteeth - then takes over, artfully weaving his way through multitudinous perils.

Nobody dreamed "such agility of soul could speak from a human face".

Later on, a fat count, a noble woman and a plague-quack carry the narrative, with Tyll flitting back and forth.

Tyll is a myth and hero in a meticulous, rational society, in Germany.

Few such myths are so elusive and so ambiguous.