Civilisations by Laurent Binet review – counterfactual hi-jinks

French author Laurent Binet is preoccupied with real-life events, AKA history, and how we tell it. There was the fretful meticulousness of his debut HHhH, a "nonfiction novel" about the assassination of Nazi chief Reinhard Heydrich; then The 7th Function of Language, a metafictional thriller about Roland Barthes and his fatal encounter with a laundry van.

Now, still not content just to make up some imaginary characters and have them interact, he presents something that reads more like a collection of primary sources than a conventional novel. What to call it? A historical systems novel, preoccupied with the roots of great power conflict, and the historical forces that underpin it? Or just a jeu d’esprit? It’s a bit of both, and it’s tremendous fun.

Each of Civilisations’ four parts poses as a historical document, and the main story runs for most of a 16th century that never happened – from when a ragtag Inca expeditionary force, fleeing civil war in South America, makes landfall in Lisbon, to the years after the Battle of Lepanto (which is, spoiler alert, fought between different forces than the real one).

The groundwork for this flight of counterfactual speculation is laid in the first two sections. First up is a spoof Norse saga, describing how Vikings not only made it to Vinlandia, the coast of North America, but as far south as what is now Panama. Erik the Red’s daughter Freydis (whose party trick of beating her breast with a sword is faithfully entered into the record) befriended the local skraelings – as the Vikings called Native Americans – and, crucially, introduced them to two technologies: horses and iron. (She also set them on the painful road to herd immunity to Old World diseases.)

Accordingly, things go the worse for Christopher Columbus when he shows up. The second section consists of fragments from his comically pious journals. He annoys the locals by abducting their people ("I assured him that it was for their salvation that we had taken those people") and in due course gets his European posterior kicked. He ends his abject days as a captive court jester in what’s now Cuba. After Columbus fails to return, the Spanish court loses its appetite for exploratory expeditions westwards.

But it’s on Columbus’s old ships that, half a generation later, Atahualpa, known to us as the last Inca emperor, sets off for Europe – as described in the main section, entitled "The Chronicles of Atahualpa". On arrival, he is no less perplexed by the shaven-headed locals, with their weird cult of the "nailed god", than Columbus was by the feathered head-dresses on the other side of the pond. Though the Incas are no strangers to human sacrifice, Atahualpa takes one look at the Inquisition burning heretics and wonders if these "Levantines" don’t go a bit far. He has his doubts, too, about the "little white llamas" – sheep – that the locals let run around everywhere. He’s mightily taken by the "black drink" that the monks make, though.

Through low cunning, high diplomacy and the occasional application of brute force, Atahualpa not only survives but prospers in the land that he dubs the "Fifth Quarter", playing squabbling European factions off against each other and in due course usurping the Holy Roman Emperor. Among the many nice touches here is that Atahualpa immediately sees the point of Machiavelli and takes much of the Florentine’s advice to heart.

Various counterfactual shenanigans play out. Inca/European dynastic alliances are forged. Atahualpa wins hearts and minds by promulgating religious tolerance and a series of quasi-socialist land reforms that sound a great deal more appealing than what was actually on offer in Europe in the real 16th century. The Reformation happens, but not quite in the way you might expect – especially as regards the Church of England. And we meet Martin Luther, who, as the Chronicler drily remarks, "had a somewhat inflexible character, which, everyone agreed, was not improving with the passing of time". Binet has a lot of fun with existing history. We get Thomas More corresponding with Erasmus about Inca theology rather than Luther’s articles, and the narrator drops little references to "the entirely misnamed Antoine the Good" or remarks, after introducing a second "The Magnanimous", that magnanimity was "a quality apparently very common among these princes".

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Everything seems to be rosy, for a while. But then the bountiful supplies of gold from across the Ocean Sea dry up and a rival gang of South Americans, the Aztecs, appear – call it the Scramble for Burgundy – and make themselves disagreeable by massacring their enemies and ripping out their still-beating hearts, as Aztecs will tend to. Surface details may change, Binet seems to be reminding us, but imperial ambition is a historical constant.

The closing section nods to the novel’s literary game-playing by following, in mock-heroic form, the travails of Miguel de Cervantes – who loses the use of his hand at Lepanto, as usual, but, in what I’m fairly sure is a departure from the historical course of events, ends up being Michel de Montaigne’s lodger for a bit. That detail is splendidly in the spirit of this book, which you could see as a world-historical version of the parlour game where you assemble a fantasy dinner party from the past.

• Civilisations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor, is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.