As he sinks into a coma, the king finds his mind wandering to the theatrical performances that his wife loves: “A king without a country in a storm, alone with his fool – something like this would never happen in a play. At the end of the episode with the king of Bohemia, Tyll and the sick king end up separated from the royal retainers and lost in a snowstorm. He also toys with sly literary allusions. Kehlmann will dramatise the same events from different viewpoints, giving us slightly different information each time, and showing how memory and self-interest obscure the truth of history. It’s only on careful inspection that you see how cunningly each episode fits with the others.

‘Like an X-rated Robin Hood.’ An engraved frontispiece of a late 18th-century book, taken from an earlier wood block. Along the way, he flees witch-hunters, finds himself in a collapsed mine outside a besieged city, entertains the inhabitants of a doomed hamlet and performs for royalty. The book recounts Tyll’s life from his childhood in a tiny village to his ascent to the 17th-century equivalent of showbusiness celebrity as a court jester. This is because it first of all succeeds as a rip-roaring yarn – one of the reasons it’s being turned into a Netflix series. However, it demonstrates that it’s possible to read Tyll with pleasure while knowing next to nothing about the history. I’m ashamed to admit that before I began this book I knew less about this conflict, which shaped modern Europe and cost millions of lives, than I did about the bloody but fictional struggles that tear Westeros apart in Game of Thrones.

Kehlmann, who found fame with another historical novel, 2006’s Measuring the World, transplants his hero to the gritty context of the thirty years’ war, which I now know lasted from 1618 to 1648. Tyll Ulenspiegel first crops up in a German jokebook – the gratifyingly evocative German word is Schwankbuch – from the early 16th century. T he hero of Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel is based on a character from German folklore, a subversive prankster who challenges the social order with filthy slapstick and fart jokes, like an X-rated Robin Hood.

Tyll goodreads