Rainy Season, By Jose Eduardo Agualusa trans Daniel Hahn

Imagine Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago transplanted to tropical Africa, chopped up into glittering, bloodstained fragments and set to dance to a delirious rumba. Then you might begin to take the measure of this novel of a revolution that devours its children. When Angola's Jose Eduardo Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 with The Book of Chameleons, readers glimpsed the scars of betrayal, loss and grief that lay behind its magically charming surfaces. Yet, without a prior grasp of Angola's punishing trek from Portuguese rule past a disputed independence and into decades of sporadic civil strife, the picture for outsiders remained a little blurred.

Rainy Season, first published in Portuguese in 1996, is a less oblique but less suavely controlled novel. Tender and terrifying by turns, it shows how a heroic artists' and thinkers' revolt fragments into internecine suspicion, conflict and cruelty. Agualusa begins with the device of a legendary poet and freedom fighter, Lidia Ferreira, and the narrator's quest for her and her comrades' tangled past - in the rebel salons of Paris and Berlin, the colonial mansions of Huambo, or the backstreet bordellos of Luanda, that "little city in the suburbs of the world". All literary sleight-of-hand-aside, the author always feels painfully close to his scorching subject-matter.

Like the elusive Lidia herself, Agualusa snares the anti-colonial insurrection of the early 1970s and its vicious aftermath in a net of glinting images. A Portuguese napalm raid in the forest fixes an "anxious instant in a bell-jar of ashes". The jailed and beaten narrator remembers a moment with a murdered girlfriend during a train ride at dusk, as "slow herds of antelopes" arrive "fearfully to lick the humidity from the cold iron of the rails".

As The Book of Chameleons and his other works so amply prove, Agualusa has a touch and tone of such lyrical and rhythmic grace that it can make the worst horrors almost bearable. Again, Daniel Hahn translates this lissom, glancing style with all the panache and delicacy that it requires. For interested readers, he reprints as an appendix the blog in which he discussed this translation's special challenges.

Yet the raw suffering and murky intrigue that grip Angola after the MPLA movement – briefly – triumphs in 1975 test this sinuous line of beauty to breaking-point. A mixed bunch of revolutionaries, fellow-travellers and opportunists, from the seductive singer-turned-commissar Tiago to the turncoat mercenary Angel and Lidia's alluring daughter, Paulete, sink into the swamp of faction-fighting. This vicious narcissism of small differences covers the later pages with a locust-swarm of acronyms and condemns many of the characters to prison, torture and despair.

Our idealistic narrator, like Agualusa and Lidia herself, admires the joyful, mixed-race Creole culture of traditional Angola: "a mixture of deepest Africa and old colonial Europe". At first these poetic insurgents support the mestizo MPLA which – ANC-style - keeps its liberation politics free of racial nationalism. The scene darkens as the MPLA's post-independence rivalry with the pro-Western (but more "African") UNITA breeds radical offshoots that end up on the rough receiving end of revolutionary justice. Fetid cells, bestial torments and ice-hearted interrogators fill some chilling chapters.

Somehow, flashes of colour and comedy alleviate the gloom, even if the humour tends in the gallows direction – as with a re-usable pink-and-gold coffin, the "Passion Bus". Eventually, time heals – or simply washes unhappy histories away. One feared ogre of a torturer, the "Wolf of Africa", ends up a "nice old man" who sells birds in a shopping centre. But this urgent, anguished novel arrives at no real closure or conciliation. Perhaps, at the time of its writing, Agualusa could hardly envisage any sense of an ending for the stories of this messily protracted war. Here the fires of revolution, so ferociously depicted, almost burn up his book.