The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier review

"It was Friday evening, half an hour before the light struck, and she was attempting to open a package with a carving knife." As first sentences go, it's a minor masterclass in reader enticement. And Kevin Brockmeier's (sometimes literally) dazzling creation goes on to fulfil every single spark of that opening promise. Brockmeier is an Arkansas-based novelist and short story writer whose works are complex blends of the fantastical and literary (his last novel, The Brief History of the Dead, was about an afterlife sustained by the memories of the living). After two careful readings, I'm still not sure I've grasped what The Illumination - his third novel - is about. What I do know is that it's the most exciting and, in some ways, generous piece of fiction I've read in some time.

Lonely, divorced Carol Ann – that's her in the opening chapter – ends up in the ER with a hand injury. When she sees light shining out of her wound – "a silvery white disc that showed even through her thumbnail" – she assumes she's hallucinating. But she's not. All over the world, as the TV news later confirms, the sick and injured are radiating light. Headaches, tumours, abrasions are ablaze. Even the doctor who treats Carol Ann has tension in his neck which shows up as "a hundred threads of light twisting like algae in an underwater current".

Meanwhile, in the next bed a young woman lies badly injured after a car accident that also involved her husband. She shows Carol Ann a journal where she's copied down the one-per-day love notes her husband leaves stuck to the refrigerator – each one itemising a different thing he loves about her. "I love the way you alphabetise the CDs but arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric." Assuming her husband has not survived, the woman tells Carol Ann to keep the journal. Carol Ann hesitates, but after the woman suffers a final cardiac arrest, she pockets it.

Weeks later, the tense-necked doctor who originally treated her asks her out on a date. Carol Ann readily accepts. But when he comes to pick her up, he sees the journal and is shocked. Doesn't Carol Ann realise that the woman's husband – badly injured, but now recovering – has been looking for it everywhere? By keeping it, Carol Ann has "taken the most terrible month of this man's life and made it that much worse". He phones the husband and tells him to come round immediately. End of chapter.

I rushed to turn the page, desperate to know whether, with the journal restored to its rightful owner, lonely Carol Ann – in whose company I'd spent 40 increasingly absorbing pages – would get to go on her date with the doctor. But it's not a question Brockmeier has any interest in answering. Instead the story moves on to deal with Jason, the bereaved husband, who has started hanging out with a bunch of teenagers and using their methods of self-inflicted injury – cue some spectacular descriptions of flesh drenched in light – as a way of numbing the pain of bereavement.

One day a young boy who sees pain radiating from even inanimate objects creeps up Jason's garden path and, spying the journal on a table, aching "with the hard light of something broken", can't resist stealing it. The boy's chapter – he is beaten at home and bullied at school – ends with him handing it over without explanation to a "tall man in church clothes" who arrives at his door giving out religious flyers. After the missionary's chapter, a novelist called Nina – a woman whose mouth is constantly "shimmering" with the pain of undiagnosable ulcers – finds the journal where he has left it, in a hotel bedside drawer, and takes it home with her. And so it goes on.

Brockmeier's protagonist, and the pulsing thread that pulls all these stories together, is of course the journal. It's been done before (Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes springs to mind) but, because it grew out of love, this journal is less an object, more an entire emotional landscape. Its many small utterances, which range from the quirkily intimate to the downright soppy (but are never less than completely credible), begin to steer the novel in a way that feels both mysterious and euphoric. So what's Brockmeier saying? That even the love of strangers has a magnetic quality, that it endures? Maybe, but that doesn't begin to describe the originality and complexity of this piece of writing.

Each new character and scenario takes up a single chapter but covers months, sometimes years – and in the case of Ryan the missionary a whole lifetime – and each would easily expand to fill a whole novel. And yet in a way which I found both risky and startling and finally very moving, Brockmeier dares to leave things ragged, to let things go.

For instance, we never meet Carol Ann or her doctor again. And I would have liked to. But you feel they are out there somewhere because the novel is flecked through with reminders that this is a single, painful world we inhabit. Time frames overlap in uneasy ways. Ryan, driving along the highway, passes a traffic accident with two bodies hanging from their safety belts "glowing like pillars of fire". Your heart snags as you realise it's Jason and his wife.

I said I'm not sure I understand this novel, but maybe it's more that I can't communicate my understanding in a way that feels either truthful or adequate. I tried to tell someone what it was about and heard myself talking whimsical gibberish.But so what? I relish the way it dazzles and mystifies. I love its generosity of spirit, its whiff of frailty – the way, given Brockmeier's touch with language, he manages to make the whole thing seem steeped in light. Ultimately, I think it gives us one of the most exciting things fiction can offer – a glimpse of a world that is both completely unfamiliar and heart-sinkingly recognisable, whose dark, sweet possibilities seem to exist long after the final pages of the book.

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