Where this book so resonantly succeeds is as a meditation on the many traumas of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – slap bang, as Nathan Englander reminds us, in the geographical centre of the standard map of the Earth.

This is Englander’s second novel, but his reputation was made by his first two collections of short stories. The epigraph he has chosen is from Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending and his writing has much in common with Barnes’s fine literary intelligence: a well-tempered intellectual and artistic pleasure, replete with collusive wit and playfulness. But his theme and subject here could not be less Barnesian – the psychological impact on the individual of the atrocities and failed peace efforts between the Israelis and Palestinians; how to live, in other words, within the grim cycle of reprisal.

There are several narratives. (I wondered if Englander had started with a collection of short stories and then used the multi-identity device that his theme of espionage affords to bind them.) The story centres on Z, a spy. We join him in hiding in Paris in 2002; we learn how and why he is to become a prisoner. We meet a waitress subsequently known as Shira. We spend time in the dreamscape of the great General, a portrait of Ariel Sharon, who is in a coma. And we inhabit the lives of Z’s guard, the guard’s mother and Farid, a Palestinian businessman in Berlin.

By way of managing all this, the novel is structured so that it cuts rapidly in time and place back and forth between stories – a hospital near Tel Aviv in 2014 for five pages, for example, then Berlin in 2002 for three, then “Limbo 2014” for four, then Jerusalem in 2014 for six, then Paris and so on. In terms of plot and character (as opposed to style), the reading experience is therefore somewhat jolting. Of course, the supposed gain of such chopping and changing is that it caters to the worldwide shortage in concentration spans. But Englander runs the risk of making the whole feel a little too slivered: most readers like to settle with characters, and would, in any case, surely claim decent attention spans by happy virtue of their reading at all.

There’s also something deep in the tectonics of storytelling that grinds loudly in protest whenever a novelist genre-shifts from section to section. Those readers who are busy enjoying the tense detail of the espionage story line are going to feel pangs of resentment when suddenly served up a side order of magical realism via the General’s dreams.

I didn’t mind any of this, though, and there’s an offbeat rhythm to it all. More concerning to me – and what stops the book reaching greatness – was the plot. The problem is an old one. Many stylistically inclined writers struggle with the necessary contrivance that plot requires; it’s as if their highly developed sense of taste is covertly seeking to subvert the clumsy bodge-jobs and dodgy assertions that plot can insist upon.

Now I’m sounding as if I didn’t like the novel. But I really did. There were passages of great humanity and wisdom

The truth is that Englander can’t write this kind of stuff without carbon-offsetting his story lines with so much humour, dissent, cerebration and structural legerdemain that we start to doubt them, too. You’re right, thinks the reader, plot is a nonsense. Would a Mossad agent really fall for a waitress who first says she’s very poor and then says she’s very rich? Does the experience of the prisoner and the guard ring true or is it ever so slightly notional? Would the great Palestinian tunnel-maker allow two lovers to have dinner in his tunnels beneath the bomb-blasted borderlands? Not really. And this matters because it prompts the reader to take the book less literally and so let it slide into the realm of fable or parable. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we were being very much encouraged to believe in the realism of the spy sections. Section by section, the book succeeds beautifully. But in terms of the whole piece, Englander’s artistic intentions are not, I think, fully worked out.

Now I’m sounding as if I didn’t like the novel. But I really did. There were passages of great humanity and wisdom. I was fully engaged and it made me think, and rethink, and later sent me off to educate myself on the history. Most of all I love that fiction such as this can make you experience so intensely those great subjects with which your real-life familiarity is so very slight.

Edward Docx’s Let Go My Hand is published by Picador.

• Dinner at the Centre of the Earth is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.