Two-thirds of the way through Robert Hough's new novel, a young Russian reports her experiences in Canada to a friend in St. Petersburg. Canadians, Anya Verkoskova says, "work too hard, and are boring because of it." They are also "polite to each other, without ever being friendly," and "don't know how to laugh properly." But such complaints pale when set against the country's attributes. "There is no Chechnya," she explains. "And no business gangsters, out in the street and killing each other."

Anya's initial impressions were gleaned during a disastrous first stay as the prospective e-mail-order bride of Hank Wallins. A behemoth ex-sailor suffering equally from tinnitus and a broken heart, Hank is a computer-operator drone with a Toronto insurance company. One night, having narrowly survived a shove onto a subway track, he resolves to escape his own melancholy. Surfing a website called From Russia With Love, he comes upon a woman who resembles his lost love. "Anya," he writes to her, "you know how it is, when your whole life needs changing." He visits her in St. Petersburg. She visits him in Toronto.

Following Hank and Anya back and forth across the Atlantic allows The Culprits to inhabit two societies. It is a testament to Robert Hough's talent that the novel could as easily have been written by a Russian with both hard-won insights into his own culture and a surprisingly sharp eye for Canadian foibles. As it is, this exuberant, freshly detailed story of globalized love and disorder is a bravura performance, one part literary ventriloquism and one part ripping narrative. Admirers of the author's previous books, in particular The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, will already be aware of his skill with voices.

Back home, Anya has fallen hard for a Lothario named Ruslan. Though ethnically Dagestani, he is taken by Russians for Chechen, and thus presumed to be a terrorist. The Russia of Vladimir Putin, permanently tense with state-generated menace, bristles from the disastrous conflict in Chechnya and, since 9/11, the emergence of Wahhabi cells bent on taking the resistance back to the motherland. Ruslan may be a lover, not a fighter, and may even be happy to sing his religion's praises – "Sweet Allah, life was good! Sweet Allah, living was such a continuous wonder!" he thinks en route to another sexual romp – but ultimately he wears the wrong look in the wrong town.

His abduction by sadistic security forces, vividly and harrowingly imagined, leaves him shattered. From the clutches of one extreme, Ruslan is tossed into the arms of another, this one at least familiar. The terrorists can think of a range of uses for destroyed souls, including extorting cash from ex-lovers, now linked to presumed-wealthy Westerners, and wearing girdles of explosives in crowded public places. Sundry "culprits" yoke two broken men to one whole woman. Hough's love triangle belongs squarely to our century.

The prose in The Culprits serves almost as a reply to Anya Verkoskova's complaint about Canadian dullness. It is funny and warm and wonderfully extravagant. There is certainly nothing reticent about a purse dog that looks like "shredded white Kleenex" or forearms "kelpy with tattoos."

The same holds true for Hough's impolite, and entirely successful, incursions into the hearts and minds of characters of radically different cultural temperament from decent, plodding Hank Wallins. In their bountifulness and lyricism, even the book's sex scenes may be aimed at convincing Anya to reconsider her opinion. "Hank held her at the place where a woman's body sweeps in from the hip bones," reads one passage, "and they found a rhythm that was close to their hearts' unified beating." The novel has been constructed sentence by sentence, and is without so much as a single middling paragraph.

Less successful is Hough's borrowing of a trick of the contemporary novel trade. The Culprits is told in a manner that may be overly familiar to readers of Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass: the narrator who relays the tale from some self-consciously literary perch – the womb, the grave, a book-length note composed shortly before suicide – allowing for philosophical musings and perhaps a nifty plot twist toward the end. Curiously, Martin Amis used a version of this in his own 2006 Russian novel, House of Meetings. Such contrivances are rarely effective, aside from allowing for splashy openings. They also quickly become a distraction.

Yet for all its slightly trendy tectonics, The Culprits is old-fashioned in its ambitions. As a novelist, Robert Hough hasn't only impressive technical gifts and strong storytelling instincts. He brings to his fiction a kind of attentive regard for human nature and empathy for the plight of regular folk, whether those trials are as enormous as societal meltdown or as small as private struggles with happiness. "But humans, they cope," the narrator says proudly. "It is what they're known for."