Tom McCarthy has in recent months been publicly heralded as a champion of the avant-garde, so readers approaching his third novel, C, could be forgiven for expecting it to be plot-less and impenetrable. As anyone who has grappled with the likes of Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet knows, though avant-garde literature has many virtues, accessibility isn’t always one of them. A word of reassurance, then: C is surprisingly user-friendly. It features such middlebrow amenities as plot, character and location, and working out who is doing what, where and when is in general fairly straightforward.

In fact, in some ways C couldn’t be much more conventional. Not only a historical novel (that most Booker-friendly of formats), C even follows a traditional bildungsroman arc, taking as its subject the life-story of a central character. The novel starts with the birth of its protagonist Serge Carrefax in 1898, and ends, symmetrically enough, with his death in 1922 – the year that saw the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Wasteland, and is often held to be the high-water mark of the Modernist movement. However, though the architecture may look familiar, C is a novel that is likely to perplex as many readers as it captivates.

Like an earlier Forest Gump, Serge’s brief but eventful life encompasses many of the cultural, historical and technological developments that characterise the dawn of the modern world: telecommunications, silent movies, psychoanalysis, aviation, the First World War, drugs, industrialisation, Egyptology – you name it, if you can find it in a textbook on the context surrounding literary Modernism, you can probably find it in C. From his childhood on a pastoral country estate, Serge’s short life takes in spells as a patient in an Eastern European sanatorium, as an airborne radio operator in World War One, a libertine student in roaring 1920s London, and a brief and fateful stint as an employee of an early telecommunications company in Egypt.

Yet despite this wide-ranging plot and Serge’s epoch-defining experiences, he is an inscrutable and seemingly emotionless character whom we never really get to know. Indeed, there is often the sense that the protagonist is being used primarily as a vehicle for McCarthy’s ideas, and this approach may be off-putting for those who go to fiction for well-drawn and believable characters. Throughout the novel, technology – from wireless radio to moving pictures to aeroplanes to telephone wires – is buzzing and crackling, clanging and grinding away in the background. Serge’s life is arguably primarily the story of the various new technologies with which he coincides, meaning that for all C’s layers and elaborate patterns, the basic realist blocks on which it is built sometimes feel like a half-hearted distraction from its actual concerns.

Like McCarthy’s debut Remainder, C is not a novel that seeks to knock you out with stylistic pyrotechnics, but it is intricate, subtle and sustained, if not without the occasional longeur. What is perhaps most interesting about C is that it seems to take on the ‘conventional’ novel in the domain of content rather than form. This means it is able to be ambitious and challenging without using the techniques – such as stream of consciousness and cut-up narrative – that make much avant-garde literature intimidating and inaccessible to the general reader. A novel of gargantuan learning lightly worn, C may not have been deemed the best novel on this year’s Booker shortlist, but it was almost certainly the most ambitious.

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