Faber £17.99 pp900

A police officer stands in the grilling sun of midday Bombay in front of a modernist house. The building, whose sugar-white stucco covers solid metal, is built to withstand nuclear attack. Inside, is Ganesh Gaitonde, gangster-chief, arms-supplier to the Hindu nationalist movement and secret government agent. Amplifiers convey his voice to the police outdoors. He has begun his life-story, but he is taking too long for Inspector Sartaj Singh, who orders a bulldozer. The supposedly impregnable hideout is breached. Gaitonde shoots himself in the head.

His ghost takes up the tale. It’s a saga full of social upheaval and personal violence, spanning decades and touching on every aspect of the city’s life. In Vikram Chandra’s capacious novel it alternates with chapters describing Sartaj’s investigation into his death. Between them the two narratives add up to a kaleidoscopic vision of an immense city — glittering and squalid, pullulating with energy, grossly overpopulated, driven by the volatile forces of ambition, despair and religious ardour.

That city is the real protagonist of Chandra’s book, as well as the stage on which his Comédie Humaine is played out. Appropriately, the disaster, which both master criminal and policeman are struggling to avert, is one that threatens, not any particular person or group, but the whole reeking, noisy, beautiful place.

Sacred Games is a compendium of stories. Some of them are presented as such — fragmentary pieces of lives only tangentially linked to those of the leading actors, such as the vignette showing a Pakistani intelligence officer locking the door of his room in London before settling down to the knitting that soothes his ulcers, or the episode, drawn from Sartaj’s mother’s childhood in the Punjab, of a Sikh family whose domestic squabbles are brutally interrupted by the violence following Partition.

But even the main threads of the narrative (Gaitonde’s reminiscences, Sartaj’s policework) are made up of a multitude of twisted strands. The pretty teenager who bewitches her brother-in-law with fantasies of showbiz stardom, and who ends up procuress to the criminal elite; the policeman’s son, gentle and dreamy, rerouted towards delinquency after his father is killed making an arrest; the insinuating social worker who hunts for political influence through the stinking mud of the shanty towns; the silly, besotted air-hostess whose lapdog, Fluffy, is thrown out of a fifth-floor window in the novel’s first paragraph but who, by its end, has been allowed enough sympathy to move Sartaj to the stupidest action we see him commit; each of these characters and dozens of others add something — a piece of a glitter or a dark accent — to the immense mosaic Chandra is constructing.

Gaitonde tells his own story. Morally and emotionally numb, preposterously self-deluding, he’s a narrator whose unreliability is obvious. This allows for plentiful irony and some shocks: he follows the appalling account of his feeding a loyal follower with greasy bhajis before shooting him in the head, with a paragraph beginning “I was happy”. Most of his narrative wavers queasily between pathos and the grotesque. He’s a criminal mastermind who believes that painful exercises designed to enlarge his penis will win him true love. He’s an arbiter of the underworld who becomes the whining disciple of a guru. He’s not someone inside whose consciousness I wanted to spend quite as much time as Chandra requires us to do here. But there is always relief at hand, with the repeated shifts back to the cool third-person narration of Sartaj’s side of the story.

World-weary and heart-sore, essentially decent but inescapably soiled by the corruption all around him, Sartaj is a detective from a long and attractive literary line of disillusioned good guys. He saves the world (Chandra’s framing plot is as large-scale as the thriller-movie Gaitonde produces), but he betrays a friend to do so. The ending of this hugely ambitious and dazzlingly energetic book is downbeat. “He went in and began another day.”

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