Explorer and non-fiction writer Robert Twigger’s debut novel is a sweeping yet intimate tale of travel, study, and the power of the human mind. Mental discipline is a subject Twigger certainly knows something about. Far from restricting himself to the traditional sedentary and pallid life of the writer, Twigger’s most macho claim to fame lies in him catching the world’s largest snake, a 30 foot python, on an Indonesian expedition filmed by Channel 4. Twigger is described on one website as a “poet, bodyguard, rap artist, hearse driver and winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.”He is known to have made a study of polymathy throughout his life, and in his novel he presents us with the ultimate polymath, the mysterious Dr Ragab.

Dr Ragab’s name echoes around Cairo society with an incantatory insistence, without anyone really knowing what it is he actually does. A so-called “master of disguise,” it is supposed that he is “a doctor of everything,” who drills an uncertain young German Hertwig in mental discipline and his Universal language, equipping Hertwig to cope with a great mental trial in years to come: that of incarceration.

Twigger’s anonymous protagonist (not Hertwig) is besotted with the subterranean, and more specifically with bunkers. An unassuming young writer of companies’ histories, he burrows, mole-like through the history of his passion, taking in his great aunt’s air-raid shelter in Worthing, and landing up in Germany on a bunker-lover’s pilgrimage, having been commissioned to write the history of a leading aluminium firm, whose founder’s house happens to boast an extraordinarily fine bunker in which are stored family records and papers. Among these papers is an account of the incarceration in that bunker of the man who built it, Hertwig, uncle of the present occupant.

Hertwig’s story becomes the main body of the text, while the faltering protagonist’s words recede into italicized interjections. This voice from the past, read second hand, resounds with far greater positivity and conviction than that of the contemporary narrative, and up until the conclusion of the novel it seems that the hero is looking to the past to instruct, or perhaps avoid, his rather limp present. Both Hertwig in the 1920s and the hero now are seeking a codified answer to life, and their quests take them to Dr Ragab and his Universal Language. The nuts and bolts of Dr Ragab’s language are perhaps the least interesting part of the novel. Twigger describes all sort of strange contortions that accompany each word such as “rotate the head and neck forwards duck fashion”, which appear to serve little purpose beyond weak comedy.

The interweaving of the trivia of the protagonist’s life and the claustrophobic drama of Hertwig’s account works surprisingly well, each man looking trustingly to Dr Ragab for guidance, and through this to the power of the mind, exploring the boundaries of pain, endurance, and mental escapism. The novel manages to effortlessly journey between dangerous and intoxicating Cairo, rainy London, Germany during the second world war, and the stifling confines of a dark oak bunker without any sense of contrivance. Twigger’s fluent prose and light self-deprecating tone endear the central character to the reader, with his “thin blond hair” and ineffectual eloquence, also providing a subtle antidote to the essentially dark and brutal events of this hypnotic yet strangely, inconclusively uplifting story.

Dr. Ragab’s Universal language is published by Pan Macmillan.