HOW shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? asks the Psalm that becomes a uniting obsession for the characters in Russell Hoban’s The Bat Tattoo. It could also refer to Hoban’s long quest as a novelist and poet to find new ways to use language; sometimes, as in the classic Riddley Walker (reissued by Bloomsbury, with a foreword by Will Self), by creating a new one.

The Bat Tattoo is about Roswell Clark, a middle-aged American expat living in Fulham on the proceeds of his bizarre invention — a miniature crash-test dummy in a radio-controlled car that springs back into shape after every smash. It was inspired by his father, who was working on a material with shape memory when, drunk, he crashed his car, and ruined Roswell’s childhood. His wife sold his body to crash-test scientists, to be strapped into the driving seat of a car that was crashed again and again.

The legacy of grief, mixed with nostalgia for an age of innocence, is what binds Roswell, the antique dealer Sarah Varley and the mysterious French millionaire who loved the crash-test toy so much that he employed Roswell to make bespoke toys of a more adult nature. (Readers of Hoban’s last book, Amaryllis Night and Day, will already be accustomed to the author’s take on erotic automata, and will also be pleased to hear news of Amaryllis herself.)

In the course of this increasingly strange work for the patron whose money turns out to be dirtier than his taste in playthings, Roswell gets together with Sarah against the soundtrack of sung psalms, the Fulham Road and Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?. Their destinies collide in a series of surprising coincidences — they share melancholic widowhood, a postcode, and a fascination with carved wood. Most of all, they share the same tattoo. Roswell meets Sarah at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he is photographing a bat on a Chinese bowl. He wants the image tattooed on his arm, and there she is revisiting the same bat that is already inked on to hers.

And here is the question at the heart of Hoban’s story: is coincidence, when viewed from the necessarily retrospective eye of the told tale, extraordinary or ordinary? Can there be any such thing as chance in a story, or only fate?

Key to Hoban’s attempt at an answer in The Bat Tattoo is the Bible — the book in which everything that happens is definitely happening for a reason. His characters, mostly non-religious, share a fascination with the story of Jesus, and return repeatedly to images of His Crucifixion. Another theme is the plight of the Israelites as sung in operas such as Nabucco and anthems by the likes of Boney M. The story of a bewildered people in search of a place and a voice reflects the estrangement of Roswell and Sarah — and to a greater extent of their weird benefactor — from life as it should be lived.

This is not a new idea for Hoban. Riddley Walker, first published in 1980, is a dystopian cautionary tale set in an enslaved land where people face unknown powers and die horribly. It is also a parable of rebirth after a devastating Fall. The book became a cult favourite mainly for its remarkable language; a new Demotic sounding like old English with a hint of urban youth-speak.

Although the period was replete with this sort of post-apocalyptic folk art, Riddley endured, because in it Hoban truly did his job, going much further than, say, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange in inventing a new language that created a place for its exiled speakers to live.

In The Bat Tattoo, Hoban’s inquisition into embodiments of suffering and redemption often takes the more restrained form of a touring history lesson about the objects that have caught his eye in various churches and museums across Europe. But what better guide than he, whose meditations seem to stem from real creative rapture, and whose visionary interpretations are a joy to explore.

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