Billed as a fiction/poetry hybrid, Craig Raine's History: The Home Movie wilfully dispenses with the Pushkinian elements of strong narrative, deeply drawn characters, and a bustling, involved narrator—and there is no complex verse form, either. Home movie, yes: or perhaps an evening at the music hall.

The first 'chapter' arranges the Pasternaks—Russian, renowned—in a filmic family group at a Black Sea dacha in 1905. The second shows Queenie Raine's peeing-toff act flopping at the Victoria Palace in front of King Edward. The ensuing reels, or numbers, or 'chapters', show us the Pasternaks and the Raines shunted and buffeted by the century across various geographical and mental spaces and getting maimed in the process. Secondary characters include Lenin, Churchill and Haile Selassie in pleasantly incongruous situations, as well as a philandering Russian turned Oxford rapist with a vitriol-damaged, quarter-masked face. He seems a totemic, phantasmal presence in this epic sweep, both ruined and ruining.

Images and incidents flicker charmingly if bewilderingly across the screen, but a narrative presence is felt mostly in the lavish use of vivid and incredible comparison. This is a Raine trademark which once went by the name of Martianism but owes a lot to Donne. In the context of this 300-plus-page poem, when great forces are surging through small lives, this obsession with the exactness of things is curiously effective. For Raine, the past is a rummage of discarded objects; to experience it as anything other than a costume drama is to double-take on things once general, but now invested with the burnished particularity of the antique, the oddity of junk. The process kicks off with the print on the page: a pince-nez is 'like the letter g'; in 1921, a telephone is 'an earwig of brass and bakelite'; a rough midwife's rubber gloves 'cackle … like hot fat' in 1929; in 1937, SS officers salute on a train with 'a croquet click of heels'. Raine is equally good on bodies. The Lucian Freud of poetry, Raine particularises his characters by their fleshly parts, eternally pillaged by time and history and other people. Medical appliances abound alarmingly. Sex is generally self-abuse.

In the grander schema of the poem, it's the families that are likened and linked, resembling the two sides of 'the symbol for infinity', with the spying poet at the junction. Craig Raine is married to Boris Pasternak's grand-niece, and in the printed (part-fictional) family tree she becomes his first cousin by Eliot Raine, a second-rate doctor who spends the Thirties as a genetic researcher in Hitler's Germany. The Raines are depicted as a somewhat fickle, muddled lot with a streak of madness—the signwriter Jimmy ends up 'nuts', Norman's hands turn from a boxer's fists to a faith-healer's palms after a terrible war wound, Eliot hides his spanking magazines in a deed box.

The Pasternaks' higher culture and lightly bohemian contentment is swiftly shattered; the ominous opening image of Leonid the painter-father's discarded newspaper stirring and blooming 'as if the letters lived' prepares us for the fraught set-pieces of private and public dispersion across Europe. Here, nuttiness is politically imposed. Boris Pasternak himself, much troubled by his teeth and his women, never really grows beyond biopic grittiness. There are, however, some secretive references to his poetry; in 1950 his exiled sister Zhonya (like Craig Raine)

    … pays attention to particulars.
    The line of drips left on the cup
    sometimes makes a book of matches.
    Her lipstick sometimes leaves
    a segment of blood orange
    on her glass of orange juice.
    She cares about coincidence,
    things coming together.

Pasternak's own marvellous poem 'From Superstition' opens with an image of his room as 'a matchbox with an orange'. It closes with the idea of himself as a book taken down from the shelf by a lover, the dust blown from his name. In 1919, Queenie Raine, mourning for her dead daughter Alice, does just the same with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

History: The Home Movie is a vast and at times immensely enjoyable poem sequence stuffed with glittering little links like these, within and without itself. The broad buckling bands of the novel are exactly what it lacks.