Winter Under Water, by James Hopkin

It is an exclusive language that sticks in foreign throats, yet can sparkle like snowflakes upon native tongues. The persistent outsider is rewarded with poetic discoveries, such as that the word for "midnight' also means "north", and "noon" means "south". A lover of language could fall in love with a language like that. Polish makes a fine muse for an English writer, and its fascination is the flame that dances and glows throughout James Hopkin's first novel.

Then there is the city, an icy fortress in which outsiders may find warm spiritual hearths if they are suitably minded and sufficiently determined. It's Krakow, in southern Poland, and also an archetypal city in Mitteleuropa, a region now a shadow of its former self, but which still attracts prospectors to the deep seams of meaning that remain its most prized resource. Hopkin's protagonist, Joseph, is a young, artistically inclined British man in search of a garret. He finds a suitably infernal lodging among the indigent and the desperate - the people, those eternal masses, surrounded by modernity but unrelieved by it, who still endure in those parts.

This is a novel about a relationship between a young man and a city, which is to say between a troubled cloud of desires, impulses and unformed narratives, and the site where these are brought to their necessary crisis. As if that were not enough, however, Joseph is given a soulmate, in a relationship that beats an inexorable retreat over the course of the story. Marta is married, and communicates with Joseph by letters interspersed through the narrative. These are epigrammatic rather than passionate, worded for an audience of more than one. The effect is not helped by Marta's continual reference to "my husband" even though Joseph knows the spouse in question. She should sound like a guilty lover, not our own dear Queen.

On the other hand, Hopkin's disinclination to name either Poland or Krakow is a reasonable means to engage with those demanding histories without being taken over by them. Although he falls short on the epistolary thread, Hopkin's treatment of Joseph's impersonal relationships -- with place, culture and language - has the sensitivity and creative ardour that such relationships demand. He sustains a romantic fascination with the milieu without romanticising its denizens. Nor does he wallow in their degradation: he depicts it in terms that are sometimes ghastly, but he remains fundamentally respectful. He is thus able to introduce images that have elsewhere become clichéd - there's a cabaret turn at one point - without undermining his credibility.

The echoes of the period between the wars are essential, because the story is set not just in Mitteleuropa but in a kind of middle-modernity that is now equally anachronistic. Marta writes all her epistles on paper, and as far as this book is concerned there is no such thing as a mobile phone. She and Joseph could be in the 1930s, were it not for the overbearing weight of politics that would intrude. They have a seriousness and depth that belongs to those times more than to these. But it is a spell that must be broken. The country enters the EU; the Angst-tourists fill the cafes: Joseph finds himself mocked and cheapened by the sight of "a sad-faced male at nearly every table, masters of mid-afternoon yearnings". Hopkin has a pleasing ability to be elegiac and satirical in the same breath.

And his melancholy is rich with purpose too. Even as he lets the love-affair expire and admits that the city will be turned into pastiche, his characters affirm that there is still a passionate seriousness abroad.

Marek Kohn's 'A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination' is published by Faber & Faber