Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue review – a rich historical pageant

History is an eclectic matchmaker and places odd couples in bizarre situations: Seneca taught (or tried teaching) ethics to the young Nero; stout Cortés played chess with Moctezuma (Cortés won); Cardinal Spellman and Mae West were paired during a lifeboat drill in which the cardinal helped the film star into her life jacket; the priggish TS Eliot bickered with the ribald Groucho Marx over a display of photographs. Now we discover that the painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo fought a duel under the guise of a game of tennis, an encounter that provides the core narrative of the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, brilliantly translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Sudden Death traces the convoluted story of the antagonism between these two men. Caravaggio, as is known, was the brilliant and irascible artist whose portraits of saints and other holy figures, which he modelled on prostitutes and beggars, kept his audience in a state of shock. Quevedo, as is perhaps not so well known outside the Spanish-speaking world, was an irascible and brilliant writer whose satirical prose and exquisite verse, written under the Inquisition’s vigilant eye, kept his audience in much the same state. Both were wanted for murder by the authorities and both died of a malignant fever. Quevedo’s last words were to a friend who asked him to leave some money to pay the musicians at his funeral: “Let those who enjoy the tune pay the piper.” We don’t know what Caravaggio’s last words might have been. The two men, however, stood at opposite poles: Caravaggio was an eccentric rebel, violent and anarchic; Quevedo was a conservative bigot, ambitious and supercilious. And all the conflicting forces of Europe’s golden age stood behind one or the other.

With this in mind, Sudden Death may seem like an entertaining romp in which these two monsters battle one another with tennis rackets. Nothing so simple or tame: the novel is a complex historical pageant of astonishing richness that portrays the imperial ambitions of Spain and the power struggles of the Italian states, the cultural clashes between the Catholic church and the people of the new world, the conflict between the creative arts and the political and religious dogmas of the time. It is also a history of the game of tennis. And beneath all this, like an undercurrent, runs the troubled question of Mexico’s identity.

The novel is divided into three sets, interspersed with historical anecdotes, literary titbits, extracts from historical works, lists of facts and characters, scholarly annotations, accounts of the author’s present-day life in New York, memories of his Mexican childhood. For Enrigue, history is the art of association, and what we choose to chronicle is less illuminating than in what order we present the facts. He is wonderfully skilful at creating these sequences of counterpoised narratives. The tale of Anne Boleyn’s hair – preserved after her execution and infamously converted into much-coveted tennis balls – is offset by the story of the crafting of images by the Aztecs from the feathers of tropical birds, which in turn became venerated relics in the hands of Europeans. The story of Caravaggio’s invention of the chiaroscuro “that forever changed the way a canvas can be inhabited” is paralleled by that of Cortés and his guide, translator and mistress La Malinche, a Nahua woman from the Gulf coast who became, for the conquistadores, a bridge between native languages and their own Castilian. And yet, in spite of these interweavings, the cultural chasm, as we regretfully know, was to remain as before. Enrigue provides an example: “Hernán Cortés to one of his captains at a peaceful moment, serenaded by the clamour of insects in the Altiplano night: When these savages play ball, it’s the winner who loses his head. The soldier scratches his beard. Spawn of the Devil, they are, he says; they’ll have to be taught that it’s the loser whose head rolls.”

Octavio Paz once remarked that “the whole history of Mexico, from the conquest to the revolution, can be seen as a search for a identity, whether distorted or wearing a mask”. In Sudden Death, Enrigue has portrayed this identity as something still in the making, multifaceted and deeply troubled, born from an ongoing conflict as merciless and calculating as a tennis match played from either side of the ocean by unequal rivals and over many bloody centuries.

• Alberto Manguel’s Curiosity is published by Yale. To order Sudden Death for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.