UNREADABLE. That’s the first thing people notice about WH Auden in Polly Clark’s superlative debut novel. Clark’s description of him on her opening page reads: "His blue eyes flicker with a lively intelligence that animates all his features. It’s as if one can see the thoughts playing in his mind. But this is an illusion; his friends will find that they never really know him. Wystan is that terrible, isolating thing: unreadable.”

If his friends can’t read the young Wystan’s mind, what hope has a novelist more than 40 years after his death?

Clark correctly realises that instead of a linear, expository approach to Auden’s time at Larchfield, the Helensburgh public school at which he taught in the early 1930s, it is much better seen through another mind altogether. That mind belongs to Dora Fielding, an English lexicographer who in the late noughties is newly married to an architect, heavily pregnant, and about to move into Lower Paradise, the bottom half of a converted sea-facing Helensburgh villa.

Just how inappropriately named is their new flat becomes apparent early on. Upstairs, their neighbours from hell are the Divines, Mo and Terrence – Christian bigots who cannot forgive Dora and husband Kit from outbidding their grown-up son and his family and buying the downstairs flat. As the war between the neighbours escalates, Dora’s dream of starting a new life in a new country fades, her fears over her daughter’s premature birth overtaken by post-natal blues. While the Divines play gospel music upstairs, in Lower Paradise Dora is purgatorially binge-watching Friends and quietly going mad.

Before settling in among Helensburgh’s indiscreet and distinctly uncharming bourgeoisie, however, Dora was a poet. “Should we have heard of you?” her neighbours ask, embarrassed and embarrassing, and there’s no reason why they should: she has just the one slim volume to her name. So too, when he arrived at Larchfield, did Auden, who like Dora was disliked for his Englishness. Like her too, left alone with her baby, he feels isolated, and not just by his homosexuality: “apart from exasperated exchanges he has with the boys, he goes almost the whole day without conversation”. They’ve both left the cultural vigour of Oxford for what Cecil Day-Lewis – Auden’s predecessor at Larchfield – calls “the Wimbledon of the north”.

Put like this, the novel’s mirrored architecture might seem too obvious, but even though successive chapters, switching between Auden in the past and Dora in the present, invariably contain at least some echo of each other, these are allusive rather than obtrusive. Both Wystan and Dora are trying to find answers in a place where there don’t seem to be any: Wystan through love, and Dora through resurrecting her ambitions to write, inspired by wanting to find out more about Auden’s life at Larchfield. If he could survive emotionally in such a hostile place, so perhaps can she.

At some stage, we sense, those alternating chapters are going to come together, those two minds meet and time dissolve. Clark nudges the process along by blurring the differences: just as the Wystan chapters open in the present tense, Dora’s always use the past, and when we see a poet trying out words, it is more usually Dora than Wystan.

We’ll meet Auden’s old schoolfriend Christopher Isherwood in this story, go with them to the Cosy Club in Berlin in the last days before the Brownshirts kicked down its doors, and be made to realise the near-impossibility of open homosexual love in those not-so-distant days. But Clark’s portrait of Auden reveals even more than that.

When they first met at school – even though Auden was two years younger – Isherwood once wrote that he had “a smirking, tantalising air of knowing disreputable and exciting secrets”. In adulthood, this has transformed into the charisma of the man we meet in these pages – flamboyant, loving, wise, daring and, above all, with a sense of purpose.

It’s this last quality that Dora is most drawn to, as the Divines push her to the brink of madness and as her marriage seems to be on the verge of unravelling. If only she could meet Auden, her life in limbo would stop, her poetry become less tentative, clearer, more certain.

And then she does. She meets Auden. There’s still a full half of the book to go, and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling your reading pleasure. Except to say that what had already been an intensely readable novel with the ambition to dive from highest board still has a few impressive twists and somersaults to come.


Larchfield by Polly Clark, Riverrun, £14.99