According to the Marxist critic Georg Lukács, the development of historical consciousness in the novel came about after the French Revolution and was complicated by the post-Napoleonic rise of romantic nationalisms across Europe. The creation of a feeling of historical authenticity, in an artwork which expressed formally the movement of history, was bound up with the choices made by individual heroes as they became subject to overwhelming historical forces.

Was Lukács right? Critics continue to argue about that, not least because the relation between historical process and individual agency is as difficult to disentangle in art as it is in life. But one thing is certain: Lukács's analysis is invaluable in helping to distinguish between costume drama (viz the BBC's direly lubricious The Tudors) and works which genuinely try to give what Henry James (though he deprecated the genre himself) called "a sense of the past".

In my own view, that sense has little to do with facts. The novelist's art lies in offsetting the period in which a book is written against that in which it is set, and in relating all these elements to the operations of narrative, and to what the words do in the reader's head. Spatiality comes into it, too, as depiction of "then" does not get much traction without a full consideration of "there".

Thomas Keneally is one of the historical novel's most expert practitioners, and his new book sees him back on the form that produced Schindler's Ark, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. Although there are locomotives in The People's Train, the train of the title appears little. Literally so: it is a little model of a monorail developed in Australia by a Russian exile in the second decade of the 20th century. He is among a number of escapees from Tsarist rule, of whom the principal actor is one Artem  aka "Tom"  Samsurov, whose memoirs make up the first part of Keneally's novel. They are apparently translated from the Russian, we learn from an epigraph, which also lets slip that Artem is a "Late Hero of the Soviet Revolution".

So even before we get into Artem's life in Brisbane, we know that by 1917 he will be back in Russia, involved in those 10 days that shook the world. Such teleological pull is typical of the best examples of the genre, which tend to relate backward-looking hindsight to forward-looking suspense.

The principal suspense comes from our wondering how Artem will get back to Russia. Moreover, what part will he play in the Revolution once he boards the metaphorical "people's train" getting under way there? The waiting is heightened by superb flashback chapters narrating Artem's prior escape from Russia to Australia, via Japan and Shanghai; if getting to Australia was so hard, what's getting back going to be like?

He must first extricate himself from an adulterous affair and involvement in the labour movement in Queensland, where radical activity concerned with unionisation of the railway sees him blamelessly incarcerated in Brisbane's Boggo Road jail on a murder charge.

To Hope Mockridge, his ally and lover, Artem is an exotic whose political fervour matches her own mental febrility. If, like many Australians, she cannot in the end live up to his ideals and energy, that is her lookout. Those who can, like his resourceful fellow exile Suvarov and the redoubtable journalist Paddy Dykes, win the future Soviet hero's full regard and loyalty.

Telling this part of his story, Tom/Artem learns that Australia is not yet ready for revolution. In the meantime, the niceness of Keneally's basic conceit in linking Soviet Russia with downtown Brisbane ("Tom is what they call a Bolshevik. You ought to listen to these Russians. They've got more brands of socialism than a lolly shop") can be appreciated by the reader both as a good joke and as something serious, dovetailing with the concerns of Marxist literary critics such as Lukács.

The historical reality is that there's a working-class radical tradition in Australia of which many non-Australians are not aware, and this once included a flourishing Russian community in pre-first world war Brisbane. The story of one of its actual members (Artem Sergeiev) is Keneally's template.

It was the Gallipoli campaign, in which access to a sea route to Russia was the strategic issue, that first killed off Australian radicalism with patriotic fervour  before reigniting it with a bitter sense of futile working-class sacrifice on the altar of moneyed interests. Part of the inspired elegance of The People's Train is how Gallipoli ties into the action at all levels, from commie bashing on the streets of Brisbane to its role in the fall of the Tsar.

In the second half, the story moves to Russia, and Paddy Dykes takes over the narration. The novel becomes the tale of his sexual awakening, while also asking what is the correct position for an Australian radical to take vis-a-vis the excesses of the Revolution. On the larger stage, as Artem rises through the Kharkov Soviet to the Central Committee, Lenin and Trotsky have walk-on parts in a narrative mainly concerned with the fall of the Winter Palace.

This change of narrator is another inspired stroke of Keneally's, as it enacts structurally the relation between the individual and society, which couldn't have happened if he had stuck with the "monorail" of Artem in the first person. As it is, we see Artem move away from us, as if diminishing in a lens of a telescope held at the wrong end. Our sense of the past is like that, too, but we are lucky in having authors such as Keneally who know how to dramatise the telescope's turning around from time to time, bringing "there" and "then" into the here and now.

Giles Foden's most recent novel is Turbulence, published by Faber.