At first Swanwick’s version seems a straight restatement of the story in its most familiar form, with the odd bit of distinctive imagery and an impressive evocation of 16^th century rural Germany thrown in for added value. The traditional ingredients and many of the established characters are in the mix: Faust, assisted by his long suffering apprentice Wagner, is a struggling philosopher; he conjures up Mephistopheles, thus gaining wealth, power and public acclaim; he risks all in pursuit of the chaste and unattainable Margarete, daughter of a wealthy Nuremberg merchant; and, eventually, his hubris leads to the customary outcome – ruin and tragedy.

But, as it develops, Jack Faust turns into an original, challenging and disturbing novel. Swanwick introduces a vast range of new elements. For a start, Mephistopheles is a mere homunculus, through which an entire race from a different universe communicate with Faust. Their ability to confer power upon him stems from their access to immense energies and an ability to process information at a rate incomprehensible to human beings. For much of the book the ‘demon’ is an influence and catalyst rather than a palpable presence.

The plot is built around an alternate history of the 16^th century. With the help of Mephistopheles, Faust grafts the tools and techniques of 20^th century science onto a pre-industrial body politic and world view, bringing about a spree of frenetic technological development. Four centuries of invention are crammed into the space of a few years and Faust’s era comes to encompass a host of disparate factors: mass media, the plague, the birth-control pill, powerful and repressive religious orders, the aeroplane, dark-age superstition, flash photography, absolute monarchs and the upheavals of advanced capitalism. There are echoes of Nicolas Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Keith Roberts’ classic alternate history, Pavane.

Jack Faust tackles some huge themes: the corruption of idealism by commerce, the problematic nature of the idea of ‘progress’ and the myth of the ethical neutrality of science. The narrative is permeated with a sense of doom, corruption and futility – but this is leavened with some amusing comic touches and trenchant satire. Margarete, charged with the running of Faust’s multinational corporation, is transformed into the prototype for Cosmopolitan woman – the very model of a 16^th century female executive: ‘chic, powerful and in control’. There’s a very amusing episode where she briefs a board meeting on a damage limitation exercise in response to the slurs of the tabloid press.

Swanwick’s insights into the workings of academia are no less savage and sour than his portrayal of the world of commerce. He mounts several attacks on the notion of objectivity in scientific progress – perhaps most effectively in a wry portrayal of the meeting of a circle of scholars in a bathhouse, where Faust’s attempts to bring about a paradigm shift are frustrated by a conspiratorial bunch of fat, naked, and insular philosophers.

There are, however, some irritating flaws. The fusion of ancient and modern motifs is a bit disorienting. I realise Swanwick aims to create a feeling of temporal dislocation but, at times, I lost all sense of the 16^th century setting. This problem wasn’t obviated by the occasional clumsy reference to Faust’s contemporaries, such as Albrecht Dürer and Paracelsus. And while many of the anachronistic developments are amusing or poignant, some are preposterous. For example: soon after Faust’s arrival, Margarete is transformed from a typical provincial merchant’s daughter to someone who can cope with concepts like electrons and magnetic fields.

But these are minor quibbles. Jack Faust is an intelligent, disturbing and engaging variation on a theme which seems to be far from exhausted.