Marcel Theroux celebrates the "mystical power" of books

The metaphysical idea he grapples with in his fifth novel, Strange Bodies, is the notion that books are in some way vehicles for communicating consciousness, that they have, as he suggests, "a kind of mystical power". For him they are, as the Milton quote he uses as epigraph says, "not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life".

Theroux has that feeling about literature. "A book," he considers, "or a poem, can be the distillation of someone's consciousness, and, when you read it, it's as if they impregnate you with it." Strange Bodies, with its wealth of literary references, feels like a novel written by a man who has internalised many books – from those that surrounded him in his childhood homes with his author father, Paul Theroux, and mother, Anne Castle, to those that have populated his much-travelled adult life as documentary-maker: Alice Munro, F Scott Fitzgerald and Jorge Luis Borges. Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass, he says, "is a talisman".

Does he ever feel that he may have inherited, through words, some of the consciousness of his own father? "Sometimes when I read his work," he says, "there's an uncanny sense of familiarity about the way he'll phrase something, in the rhythm of his words." In fact, read younger Theroux's writings and one is struck more by the difference to his father than the commonality. Paul Theroux has been an author happy to exploit his own life experiences, and those of people close to him, in his literature – notably on occasion, his former wife, Marcel's mother – but Marcel seems to adopt a more distanced, conceptual bent.

Out of the notion that words and books can have this power, he has made some kind of science-fiction thriller. For this, the Russian-speaker and expert in Soviet politics has used elements of real Soviet history, including the development of the transhumanist movement, led by Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who believed in life extension and the resuscitation of the dead.

"It's hard to make up something about Russia," he says, "that is actually weirder than the truth of it, though they never had any experiments like I have in my book – as far as I know."

Perhaps the greatest stamp of the worth of Theroux's writing is that the Japanese author Haruki Murakami chose to translate his last novel, Far North, into Japanese. Murakami had been recommended it by Paul Theroux, who told him it was "rather good". The author bought it in a bookshop and found it "so entrancing I read it all in one go". In an afterword to the book, he wrote that, among all the novels he had recently read, this was the "one that grabbed me the most, emotionally ... Above all, it is full of other-worldliness".

This other-worldliness is also there in Strange Bodies, although perhaps less consistently, and with a slightly different quality, almost an other-wordiness. He quotes Japanese concepts such as "mono no aware", meaning the "feeling over things".

The work is unashamedly littered with a diversity of influences, from 18th-century English writers to Kobayashi Issa's haiku, written one month after the death of his daughter. "This world of dew is a world of dew. And yet ... and yet ..."

But Theroux said he was not pushing the other-worldliness. It's just that this is his "natural bent". His wife (Faber publishing director Hannah Griffiths), he says, would probably describe him as other-worldly. He relates how, when he was writing his recent novel, he went to look for his keys and realised that he had not been out of the house for weeks: "It was odd. My family were coming and going into the house and I don't know how I did it. It's not a recipe for mental health. I'm much happier now. But I don't know how I got away without taking the kids to school. I'd like to know."

Of course, not all of his time is spent so cloistered. Theroux is a man who has seen the world, not only as a child growing up in Uganda, Singapore and England, or later as a student specialising in Russian and Eastern European studies, but over the past decade as a documentary filmmaker. He quotes Michael Frayn: "It's important that you get out of your room and see how the world really works every now and again."

Yet, even in his films, he is sometimes other-worldly. It's hard to think of many other documentary makers who could have persuaded the BBC to commission a three-part series, In Search Of Wabi Sabi, trying to get to the bottom of a difficult Japanese philosophical concept. What was charming about this series is that although he comes across initially as a faux-naif, like his brother Louis, he really does seem on a genuine quest to grasp something elusive. It is a quest, it turns out, that he continues today. On a recent visit to Japan, he asked once again, and received the reply: "Very difficult to explain in simple words, Marcel-san. This is part of the Japanese spirit. Nothing permanent, nothing perfect, nothing finished."

But some of his documentaries are more rooted. Some, like the Unreported World film on Kiev's street children, throw a light on social injustice. Perhaps it should be no surprise, given what Theroux has seen, that this book is not shot through with an indignation at the unfairness of current society. This, he says, is the book of an outraged parent – his children are six and four: "Maybe it's having kids, but I wonder if I'm getting more radical and not less, more struck by the unfairness of the world and less complacent about it. Technology won't make things any different. It will tend to be co-opted by the wealthy."

The world, of course, is unfair. And one of the ways it is unfair is that some of the people get more of its blessings, talents, wealth and other attributes than others. Theroux is one of them. His family, which includes the American filmmaker cousin Justin Theroux, seems particularly blessed. In the past, Marcel Theroux says that he did struggle at times to figure who he was in relation to his father, but now he feels as if being born to a good writer has been "a huge advantage". Father and son talk about writing. His father read the bound proof of this novel, although didn't come back with any suggestions. "I would have incorporated them if he had them," says Theroux.

His last novel, Far North, was about global warming. Set in the near future, in a world in which the new climate has reduced civilisation to pre-industrial levels, it was partly inspired by an encounter he had with a woman living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. But in Japan, where it was published after the Fukushima earthquake, it was read as being about what was happening there. "They read it as a state-of-the-nation novel," says Theroux, "not a speculative one. And I felt terrible that it had any echoes to something that actually happened." He had, he recalls, "very moving responses. People were really touched by it."

Strange Bodies comes from a very different place of inspiration. While Far North was about someone, as Theroux says, "who had never read a book", this is about someone who reads for a living, an academic and expert in the writings of Dr Johnson. Theroux, it turns out, had done this as a deliberate antidote. He hadn't wanted to spend another three years in the world of someone who wasn't a reader, so he chose someone who read avidly, and "put into the book everything that I was interested in, unashamedly". This could result in something noisy and pompous, but actually it doesn't. His references are so pleasurably diverse, and often surprising. "It was just my enthusiasms really," he says, "and I was inviting people to share in them." In other words, Strange Bodies is a highly fertile book. Not just capable of impregnating Theroux's own consciousness but that of many others. Dr Johnson and friends live on.

Strange Bodies is published by Faber & Faber, £14.99