Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler Carl-Johan Vallgren, translated by Sarah Death Harvill Secker, 304pp, £12.99

Dante envisaged him as a lout with three heads, and pegged him in the deepest circle of hell. Milton let him flourish as a crafty political rebel. More recently, Satan has gone soft and hung up his horns. Dostoevsky portrayed him as a philo sophe manqué, while in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita he was a slippery don whose retinue included a cigar-toting cat. By South Park: the Movie, he had metamorphosed into the browbeaten lover of Saddam Hussein. And according to one recent Hollywood effort, even that familiar tail may now have been tucked away in a bespoke number by Prada.

Carl-Johan Vallgren's devil is not one for keeping up appearances. In Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler, the world stirs up enough troubles of its own without any call for infernal interference. As the 20th century progresses, with its succession of bloated historical tragedies, the devil is rendered in greyscale as a bespectacled Russian bureaucrat who carefully curates the archives of the damned. The novel masquerades as a bundle of files he has collated about Josef Rubashov, a hopeless gambler in fin-de-siècle St Petersburg. On the last night of the 19th century, Rubashov makes the mistake of playing a hand with the devil. He loses the game and forfeits his soul. St Petersburg wakes up with a headache; Josef Rubashov wakes up with one hell of a hangover. He is given an "overdose of time", condemned to immortality and forced to bear witness to the proliferating infernos of 20th-century Europe. As the devil wryly explains, "hell is a metaphor . . . What's more, it's full." Rubashov joins Paracelsus, Faust and their ilk among the Contin ent's wandering damned. They shrivel into eternal old age in an echo of the appallingly immortal Struldbruggs from Gulliver's Travels.

Vallgren's first novel to be translated from his native Swedish indulged in the pica resque to such a great extent that even the title seemed intent on meandering from the confines of its title page (The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot; His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred). This second offering, too, often feels like a smorgasbord of picaresque leftovers.

Rub ashov stumbles across battlefields and ghettos, earthquakes and ethnic cleansings, nuclear tests, plane crashes and innumerable celebrities like a latter-day Candide. There are some nicely observed episodes here, as when Rubashov is employed to taste Rasputin's food for assorted poisons, or when he finds flimsy peace living as a hermit in the death-strip that buffers East from West Berlin. Yet there are too few of these scenarios to sustain the exuberant inventiveness that the itinerant heroes of magical realism have thrived on. The novel neatly summarises the repetitive tendencies of its protagonist: "This is how he seems to move: from one eruption of human or superhuman evil to the next. He is witness to natural disasters and terrible misfortunes. He turns up among mediums and occultists."

During the Cold War, Rubashov begins to look for ways to immure himself from human suffering. After an earthquake near Naples, he is buried for weeks in "a space that has the dimensions of a coffin". In another decade, he numbs himself with "a drinking binge that had lasted for four solid years". He shoots up in Scotland and strays into the tundra to escape human company. Until this pattern of withdrawal emerges, it is difficult to sympathise with a character who has witnessed scores of atrocities in fewer than 300 pages: the relentless apocalyptic drumbeat allows for no more than a flicker of moral or emotional response on the part of either Rub ashov or reader. Yet here the grim irony of Vallgren's project becomes apparent; one recognises the many omissions from his absurd kaleidoscope of suffering (Smyrna, Guernica and so on) and the uneasy facility with which he cuts from one his torical period to another. Like Rub ash ov's temporary tomb made of rubble, the techniques of fiction are a refuge in which to hibernate and escape the abundant horrors of the past.

The novel makes no serious attempt to analyse the evils of the 20th century; they came so thick and fast, it implies, that it can only mimic their distracting flurry. Given the pace at which he careers through the complexities of European history, Vallgren is at least blessed with a knack for disturbing metaphors that offer brilliant, brief illuminations of his brutal subject matter (his translator, Sarah Death, also deserves great credit for this). A beggar with no legs slithers along "like some sinewy toboggan", while a tunnel under the Berlin Wall collapses "like a dis astrous soufflé". After a playground is bombed in Belfast, Rubashov peels something from his cheek; it is "the pink tongue of a child, in which a tooth was embedded, like a sliver of almond in a sponge cake". The horror comes into focus through a disconcertingly familiar lens; the devil, if anywhere, is in the detail.

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