Novel of the week Cal Revely-Calder

192pp, Peninsula, £9.99

★★★ ★★

If the Booker Prize is a guide to what’s happening in fiction now, the Goldsmiths Prize is a braver attempt to discern what’s coming next. As it’s set on “breaking the mould”, its winners can be imperfect, but they’re rarely dull. Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner, the latest recipient, is a risk-taker to rival the best. It is, all at once, surreal, polemical and fun.

Four Londoners voyage through space, time, gender and other such conventions, on the run from authority. Their avowed enemy is dour modern Britain, from intolerant court rulings down to street-level prejudice; their rebellion is dizzying and carnivalesque.

Our protagonist is Sterling, child of the German footballer Franz Beckenbauer, a real-life figure who, in this telling, has counterfactually just been “lost to HIV/Aids”. Sterling is out on the streets of Camden – and under attack by toreadors. From there, we slalom away, via spaceships, dragons, local football and sadomasochistic sex. Matters end with the assassination of a high-court judge, who is a bird-headed frog by Hieronymus Bosch.

Surrealism offers us new eyes; that is its political strength. It can transform everyday abuses of power, the kind that might go overlooked, into allegorical symbols too outlandish to ignore. The bullfighters who attack Sterling, for example, turn out to be anti-LGBT campaigners in phantasmagorical form.

There are deficiencies in Waidner’s unruly satirical machine. A spaceship landing in Baghdad is dismissed by Iraqi locals because Western armies have done that for years. This is a weak joke, gawkily made. And chunks of asylum statistics are fine, but they distract from the formal experiments that elsewhere possess such agility.

It’s just a matter of execution. What’s righteous isn’t inherently absorbing – even to those who believe it’s right.