Joanna Kavenna is a brilliantly unpredictable novelist: whatever you think she might do next, she doesn’t. After novels dealing with depression (Inglorious), with maternity (The Birth of Love), with quantum physics (A Field Guide to Reality), she turns her formidable talents to the most pressing topic of these days: our digitally enmeshed lives. In terms of its stylistic innovations, Zed is a tour de force.

We begin with Douglas Varley, an employee of a tech super-company called Beetle. The Beetle-band on his wrist wakes him, his Alexa-like “Very Intelligent Personal Assistant”, which he has named Scrace Dickens, informs him of an urgent situation that needs his attention, and a self-driving Beetle car called a Custodian is soon on its way.

Varley has been woken early because a fellow employee, George Mann, has suffocated and stabbed his wife and two sons, then disappeared. Varley’s expertise is in the “lifechain”, a Beetle program of algorithms, and Mann seems to have broken their futurology. Nobody expected it, and therefore it is a problem. It is a “Zed” event: the unpredictable within a system of prediction.

The head of the company is an adulterous egomaniac called Guy Matthias, and not even his own software has the capacity to predict how erratic he will become over the course of the novel. Guy is obsessed with wealth, his ex-wife, immortality and his concept of “Real Virtuality”. The other main character is police officer Eloise Jayne, who is tasked with solving the reason for the murder, rather than finding the murderer. Things get worse when robotic law-enforcement officers accidentally kill an innocent man whom they wrongly identify as Mann, a sorry incident deemed a “suicide by droid” in a newspaper article written by an AI.

Many contemporary novelists have written about the corrosive effects of technology, from Dave Eggers and Don DeLillo to Ian McEwan and Nicola Barker. Kavenna’s novel, like Barker’s dystopia H(a)ppy, works on the level of syntax, as language, grammar and meaning are compromised by the machines and their human controllers. She creates almost a poetics of tautology. “Knowledge of these events might, even, endanger the safety of the public, because the public might become concerned that their safety was in danger and might proceed, therefore, in a dangerous and unsafe manner. Not knowing about the danger was the only way for the public to be safe.” Beetle unleashes a program for its virtual spaces that “translates” what you have said into what it thinks you ought to have said, so we get characters expostulating “Deity, but that is bad.”

This is a nuanced, metatextual novel; an investigation into the erasure of language and agency in which the numerous literary references – Eloise’s personal assistant is called Little Dorrit; in a nod to Maupassant, an antagonist goes by the name Bel Ami – highlight the fact that the characters quote literature but don’t read it. There is a Dickensian quality to it; I was reminded of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. But it also calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura – what is genuine and irreplaceable – and Baudrillard’s horror at the degree to which everything is hallucinatory.

In one section we get a fugue of repetition as Matthias considers the work of the cyber-hacker Gogol. “The original was an ethereal portrait of Christ, dressed in a blue robe, set against a mysterious black background, representing the unfathomable mysteries of creation … Gogol had re-created Guy’s recreation and it was an ethereal portrait of Christ, dressed in a blue robe, set against a mysterious black background, representing the unfathomable mysteries of creation. It was impossible to tell them apart.” The language spirals into loops within loops, repetitions of repetitions, an almost incantatory litany of copies of copies. There is a giddying quality to the prose, as the reader is steered through a maze of reproductions, seeking the unique.

Zed is a novel that takes our strange, hall-of-mirrors times very seriously indeed. It is a work of delirious genius, and a book to turn to the next time GoogleMail suggests you respond to emails by clicking “No thanks!” or “Yes, let’s!” or any other phrase with an exclamation rather than a question mark.

• This article was corrected on 30 July 2019. The Circumlocution Office is found in Little Dorrit, not Bleak House.

• Zed by Joanna Kavenna is published by Faber (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.