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Four hundred years on, the mad knight of La Mancha still refuses to stay down. Don Quixote is routinely labelled the first modern novel and one of the greatest works ever written, among the most-translated and best-selling books of all time - and the surprise, picking it up now, is how little of that reputation feels like embalming. The premise remains irresistible: a minor hidalgo named Alonso Quijano reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and reinvents himself as a knight-errant, recruiting a farm labourer, Sancho Panza, whose earthy wit punctures his master's lofty rhetoric. From that simple engine Cervantes generates something that is at once a hilarious parody of chivalric romance and an honest social critique written at a moment of crisis for Spanish power.

What surprises most is the humour, which still lands. Concerns about the book being dense or archaic melt away because the comedy rings with perfect pitch, helped considerably by modern translation - Edith Grossman's version in particular has become the standard recommendation, and the book reads as contemporary, charming, hilarious and accessible despite its age. It is a disservice to Cervantes to treat Don Quixote as drama alone and disregard its comedic engine. The slapstick, though, is a genuine stumbling block early on. The relentless battering of the knight - teeth knocked out, beard ripped off, pelted with stones - can read as cruel rather than funny, and a modern sensibility takes time to adjust to comedy this physical and this punishing.

Honesty demands acknowledging the slog. This is a long book that knows it is long, and Part I in particular tests patience. A large stretch unfolds at an inn the knight believes is a castle, where new arrivals keep telling loosely connected tales, many of which read as Cervantes simply wanting to tell an otherwise unrelated story. The parade of beautiful but tragic maidens grows so repetitive that the descriptor loses all meaning - and the interpolated novella of "The Ill-Advised Curiosity" is the point where even devoted readers start skimming. The book is genuinely a paradox: a thought-provoking meditation on chivalry and one man's effect on the lives of others, and also a tedious slog through stretches of inane dialogue and bawdy humour. The craftsmanship is loose by any standard. Sancho's donkey vanishes without explanation only to reappear later; the name of Sancho's wife keeps changing as though the author forgot it. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative - and the depiction of women, flat and valued almost entirely for their looks, has aged badly even allowing for the satire.

Yet the imperfection is, strangely, part of the case for the book rather than against it. The novel improves dramatically as it goes. The first half can feel tedious despite the humour; it is the second, philosophical half that makes the book great, where the two characters are affected by the world and by each other, and evolve. Part II, written a decade later, is darker, stranger and far more self-aware - characters have read Part I and manipulate the knight accordingly, a metafictional move that still feels audacious. And the famous reciprocity at the heart of the book deepens with every chapter: as Sancho's spirit ascends from reality to illusion, Don Quixote's declines from illusion to reality - the squire growing quixotic as the knight is slowly, painfully cured.

The satire, meanwhile, is broader and sharper than the windmills suggest. Barely a page passes without a stern social, political, religious or military assessment of Cervantes's Spain; the Inquisition is criticized, the government ridiculed, aristocratic arrogance skewered - nothing is sacred. That ferocity, wrapped in farce, is why the novel inspired Melville, Flaubert, Kafka, Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Proust and Borges, and why "quixotic" entered the language.

What lingers, though, is not the satire but the companionship. The bond between knight and squire - loyal, bickering, mutually transforming - is the novel's true subject, and it has a consoling power that sneaks up on you. The characters become close kin; the book is a refuge in which you are not alone in your madness, your solitude or your grief. Read it for the windmills if you must, but stay for Part II, where the joke turns melancholy and the melancholy turns profound. It drags, it digresses, it contradicts itself - and it remains, somehow, perfect.