Memory Theatre by Simon Critchley review horoscopes, death and The Eurovision Song Contest

There's a telling moment in this fiction debut when the narrator, a philosopher called Simon Critchley, takes us aside to say, in parenthesis: "I once met a Swede at a party in Stockholm who could sing every Swedish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest since 1958 – you just said the year, 1978 say, and he would begin: 'Dinga, dinga dong/ Binga, binga bong.'"

At first you are inclined to take this at face value. After all, as everyone knows, even though Eurovision began in 1956, Sweden did not participate until 1958. However, while the lyrics sound plausible enough, those are not, in fact, the opening words of the 1978 Swedish entry, which are rather more pedestrian, and in Swedish.

This is an unusual book in which fact and fancy blend in fascinating, rewarding and often very comic ways. There are two reasons why Critchley – the author, not the narrator – placed this deliberate mistake in an otherwise fact-rich novella. The first, obviously, is that it is funny. You discover quite quickly that Critchley is not one to pass up the opportunity to say "dinga, dinga dong" in a deadpan manner or to scorn a joke, especially in a book that deals with death, madness and fundamental philosophical questions about the quiddity and purpose of memory. (Another sample sentence: "I couldn't think of anything apart from death and the vague prospect of breakfast cereal.")

Secondly, it is one of those easter eggs, as coded messages hidden within a narrative are called, that indicate that this is actually fiction, and not the ouroboros, snake-swallowing-itself work that it presents itself as. It is there to remind us of not only the unreliability of the narrator, but the unreliability of fiction itself. Its close corollary is the more sinister moment in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, in which the narrator is holidaying at the tip of India on Boxing Day 2004, yet all he notices at the beach is a dead dog washed up by a wave – instead of the tsunami that shattered the lives of millions that day. It's the kind of thing that looks like a mistake – but isn't.

Critchley wants us to identify him with the "Critchley" in Memory Theatre. Their job titles, works published and, you assume, frames of reference are the same: the difference being that "Critchley" is presented at one point with a horoscope that mentions not only the works he has written, but also those he will write – works that have indeed materialised in real life. "It was funny, full of impressively wide reading and utterly shallow," he writes of his own book The Book of Dead Philosophers.

But there is more to this than a joke or two at his own expense: the horoscope also gives the date and time of his death, which provides the thrust of the book, and makes it resonate far deeper than you would have thought possible for such a brief, meta-fictionally tricksy work. Along with novelist Tom McCarthy, Critchley is a key member of The International Necronautical Society, who spend some of their time playing pranks on each other – such as sacking committee members because they are not dead – and some of it thinking profoundly about the meaning and beauty of death. The book could be seen as a side project of the INS, as its narrator has the chance to face up to death; and to the internal catastrophe that comes when death does not, in fact, arrive.

It boasts an array of references – to Giulio Camillo, the 16th-century humanist philosopher who invented the notion of the memory theatre, "the microcosm of the divine macrocosm of the universe"; to the Fall's Mark E Smith; Samuel Beckett; and a real antiquarian bookseller in Bristol. This is a remarkable debut: rich, profound and clever, but not oppressively so, and often very funny.

Memory Theatre (£9.99) is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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