Egon Loeser, the sex-starved German stage designer at the heart of this strange and brilliant novel by Ned Beauman, is obsessed with two things. The first is a girl, inauspiciously called Adele Hitler, who he meets in Thirties Berlin, where the book begins. The second is Adriano Lavincini, a late Renaissance Venetian stage-designer who, in 1677, caused part of a Parisian theatre to collapse with his teleportation device – the accident referred to in the title.

Loeser follows Adele from Berlin to Paris and Los Angeles, in the hope that she will eventually sleep with him. On the way, he meets a cast of eccentrics: a caddish Brit, Rupert Rackenham, who seduces Adele and steals the Lavincini story for his novel (and who writes for The Daily Telegraph); a physics professor trying to build his own teleportation device; an Angeleno bookseller who collects science fiction by H P Lovecraft and a con-man in Paris who tries to pass off his own work as an undiscovered novel by F Scott Fitzgerald.

Beauman, whose first novel Boxer, Beetle (2010) interwove the stories of a modern-day collector of Nazi memorabilia with that of a homosexual Jewish boxer in the 1930s, is blisteringly funny, witty and erudite. A series of dazzling metaphors and similes pinpoint an experience exactly: the physics professor, for example, “had that odd conversational manner of some scientists… that is so doggedly awkward that it sometimes seems to verge upon flirtation”. Only once or twice does this style, and off-beam subject matter, strain slightly. For the most part, however, Beauman manages to combine the intrigue of a thriller with the imagery of a comedy. It makes for an excellent read.

Living in Berlin just before the second world war, everything goes wrong for Egon Loeser, and it has nothing to do with the Nazis. In Ned Beauman's terrific second novel, longlisted this week for the Booker, his protagonist, a German set designer, is too sex-starved, self-pitying and, usually, hungover to notice that history is happening all around him.

At one point, just before he leaves Berlin to chase a girl named Adele Hitler (no relation), Loeser sees a group of what he thinks are students holding a bonfire outside the library. He assumes it is "some sort of silly art performance" and joins in, cheerfully burning the books of writers he envies. This comes at the end of a section titled Literary Realism – a dig at the one genre that doesn't know it's a genre – after which the book veers gleefully through hardboiled noir, SF, murder-mystery and romance, distorting each in turn.

There is so much pleasure in the unstable elements of the story that I couldn't help feel a loss as the wheels of the plot started to turn. Luckily, the setting up of various false leads, reveals and tricks are worth it for the brilliant finale. If there was ever any worry that he might have crammed all his ideas into his first book, the prize-winning Boxer, Beetle, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside.