Darkness and light collide in much-loved Israeli author David Grossman’s masterfully crafted A Horse Walks Into a Bar, the novel that just scooped the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

No laughing matter, this wildly intelligent parable has at its heart an at-first thoroughly unlikable stand-up comedian.

Dovaleh G has descended on a small club in an unremarkable Israeli town, Netanya, summoning two long-estranged childhood friends to witness his emotional collapse on stage.

Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, who splits the £50,000 ($84,000) prize with Grossman, there’s much more going on here, thanks to Grossman’s increasingly experimental pen.

Much to the consternation of Dovaleh’s old friends and an increasingly agitated audience, the comedian fires off racist jokes, abuses his audience and then relays the morbid story of when, as a teenager at an Israeli Army camp, he was driven home to bury a parent by a prolific joke-telling soldier.

One irate audience member shouts: “Where are the jokes? What’s going on here? What is this crap?”

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is not a comic novel. It’s an emotional tour de force that deals with broken hearts, splintered loyalties, political divides and the complicity of those who do not speak up against injustice.

Yes, that relates to Dovaleh’s childhood friends, as a young man who walked on his hands to avoid repeated beatings, but it also signals Israel’s relationship with its neighbours.

Like all of Grossman’s work, this is a novel infused with his passion for peace in the Middle East, a vision made all the more potent by the tragic death of his son Uri in the final moments of the 2006 Lebanon War.

Uri was serving in the Israeli Army when a missile struck his tank, killing him. He was only 20.

Denouncing the then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, Grossman said: “Of course I am grieving, but my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you [Olmert] and your friends are doing to it.”

That terrible loss halted the writing of Grossman’s epic novel To the End of the Land and of course filtered onto its pages when he returned to it. It’s even more present in his follow-up, 2014’s Falling Out of Time.

There’s a great deal of that soul-searching in the beautifully melancholy A Horse Walks Into a Bar and also an increasing sense of dread.

If Dovaleh is initially repulsive, then it is a testament to Grossman’s brilliance that you’ll fear for his wellbeing by its close.

In awarding the book, Nick Barely, chair of the 2017 judging panel, said: “David Grossman has attempted an ambitious high-wire act of a novel, and he’s pulled it off spectacularly.”

“A Horse Walks into a Bar shines a spotlight on the effects of grief, without any hint of sentimentality … every sentence counts.”

Like last year’s winner, Korean author Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, it will haunt you with its strange sorrow long after reading the final page.