The Last Supper, By Pawel Huelle, trans Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Although no one can ever quite track down the source, G K Chesterton is supposed to have said that when men cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. That maxim might serve as a motto for this typically inventive and ironic, but riddling and elusive, novel by one of Poland's most original writers.

Pawel Huelle from Gdansk acted as press officer for the Solidarity union movement before teaching philosophy and running a TV channel after the fall of communism. In Mercedes-Benz, his droll, charming essayistic fiction drove his own family history – and especially a sort of dynastic obsession with Mercs – down the twisting and bloodstained roads of modern Polish and German history. In Castorp, he returned to his home port – then German-owned Danzig – on the eve of the First World War to fashion a slyly comic, hindsight-free prequel to Mann's The Magic Mountain that surpassed pastiche.

The Last Supper, again centred on Gdansk, makes a small leap forward in time. Bomb attacks on liquor stores have raised the fear of jihadi militancy taking root among local Muslims (at present, they hardly exist), while others blame provocations by rival booze tycoons. The Church, via the flashy local prelate Father Monsignore (who runs his own-brand wine label), is shoring up its status via showbiz-style stunts and entrepreneurial gambits. Meanwhile, the artist Mateusz gathers a group of old friends – all veterans of the 1980s opposition circles, some thriving but others marooned in the free market – to take part in a re-enactment of the Last Supper.

Huelle sets his stage for a episodic revue – often a satire, at other times a pantomime, on occasions more like a dream-play – that skips mercurially around faith and its loss. As always with this author, we never take a direct route. The novel begins with a nightmare of civil war in a vividly composite Middle Eastern city. Soon our tour of the artist's not-yet-reunited comrades has taken in idealistic Dr Levada, as suspicious of profit-driven medicine as he was of the Stalinist kind, who plugs away at his "monotonous, downhill" job of doing good and saving lives in a rural backwater.

The ex-academic Professor Wybranski has put his faith in human lust for both earthly and unearthly bliss. He opens "central Europe's most expensive bawdy house", a temple to market values where the girls all sport fancy classical names, before branching out into New Age religious tourism. His chief guru in the "Pilgrims of Truth" racket, which for a steep fee whisks spiritual seekers around the sacred sites, is the ultra-flexible historian, Antoni Berdo. In Sarajevo, on another phoney trip, he falls for a bewitching young male dancer who – like him – belongs to an often-persecuted but indestructible sect "superior to all the Books and all the imams, rabbis, bishops and shamans". Yet Berdo will also approach the imam of the Gdansk mosque as a potential convert to Islam.

Modern art enters the frame as a substitute – or challenge to – the ancient creeds. In Gdansk, warring conceptualists quarrel over installations in the Hirst or Emin vein. Huelle has fine, scornful fun here – as with the boxes filled only with "City Air". But one artist who does hold his attention – even his respect – is the 19th-century Scottish painter, David Roberts. Several beautifully written entr'actes (once more, Huelle benefits from Antonia Lloyd-Jones's first-class translation) follow Roberts's progress through Palestine to Jerusalem in the 1840s.

The questing stranger seeks the settings of Bible scenes in this grey and dusty Ottoman province, aiming via eye and brush for the reality behind scripture and its gaudy painted images. For the Scot – with Dr Levada, a rare carrier of truth amid Huelle's chancers and cynics – the Old Masters who imagine the Crucifixion or the Agony in the Garden are saying, "look, this happened everywhere, in your city too".

Light-footed, high-spirited, detached to a fault, Huelle refuses to be pinned down to a sermon or statement. If Roberts the "superb draughtsman" embodies an honest search for meaning in a world beyond belief, then his journey has no fixed destination. Back in Poland's present (or near future) the new Last Supper will stumble into being amid farce, chaos – and an incidental tragedy. As the lights in the hired church go down, the artist prepares his camera and this motley band of history-scarred ex-dissidents strike their poses as disciples. Someone asks, "rather quietly", "But where is Jesus?"