Cumbrian novelist Jonathan Tulloch's Larkinland is a brave and ingenious rendering of the eponymous poet's first days in Hull, in the thin disguise of Arthur Merryweather, sometime chief librarian of the re-invented city's university library , and resident of a shabby guest house.

Using Larkin's bleak poem 'Mr Bleaney' as the starting point for an expansive plot development, and the austere figure of Bleaney as the mysterious former occupant of a grubby room now occupied by Merryweather, Tulloch unfolds an observationally-complex comic thriller which takes the reader on a tour of the underbelly of nineteen fifties England.

Arriving in the parody of 'Haddock Town' to take up his new post, Merryweather moves into landlady Miss Glendenning's boarding house, before embarking upon a series of misadventures revolving around the disappearance of the austere Bleaney, his unlikely connection to a group of local gangland hoodlums, the arrest of Merryweather as mistaken for Bleaney to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance, and a severally-foiled attempt at an affair with Niamh O'Leary, his assistant.

The authenticity of Merryweather's journey is conditional upon extensive research into both Larkin's autobiographical world, and the landscape and social mores of the period in which the novel is conceived. And the result is hit and miss. Striving too assiduously to realise the threadbare, fifteen-watt post-war austerities of rationing, and pinched, hypocritical provincialism, Tulloch turns a would-be mystery story into a theatre of caricatures whose statuses or occupations determine demeanour and dialogue.

There is some truth in Tulloch's exposition: the facsimile of Hull, the thriving, pervasively-stinking fish docks, the thin sparseness of Merryweather's 'digs', the clouds of cigarette smoke, the crammed double-deckers, the 'travellers', the proscriptive early-closing and the omnipresent hairnets, are all pieces of a lifelike jigsaw assembled from Larkin's poetry, social histories of the fifties, and, stretching the chronology slightly, the Terry Street of Douglas Dunn.

But the problem here lies in a paradox. Whilst the making of Merryweather in the mould of extant knowledge of Larkin's life and work yields a convincing three-dimensional pastiche of the poet, we are simultaneously viewing a version of the fifties refracted through the same lens(es).

And if we are in any doubt as to provenance of local colour, we have the architectonics of Larkin's own world of words to bolster recognition through explanation.

Tulloch is keen to extract every reference out of the poetry to render as a knowing novelistic signifier. This works well when geographical identifiers become central to plot development: the Royal Station Hotel of Larkin's poem is reinvented, in the fictionalised Hull, as a place of meetings and conventions, a venue for larceny, and a repository for hooliganistic violence perpetrated by local gangland thugs. The hotel is, in other words, a crucial device for story organisation and direction.
 

Similarly, when Arthur and the character of Teesdale visit Miss Glendenning in hospital, we are convinced by a clever re-working of Larkin's poem 'The Building', whose labyrinthine impersonality is mirrored in foreboding: 'They joined the silent crowds of visitors trudging the endless corridor', and, 'an abyss of white heads on white pillows plunging to indistinct windows'. That this lengthy episode is essential to the development of Tulloch's plotline is embellished, rather than otherwise, by the pastiche.

But the conceit works less well when used over-liberally: ships up streets, fields observed fleetingly through train windows, posters of 'Sunny Prestatyn' observed en passant, almost as though the writer was trying to persuade by an over-arching attrition of meta-narrative detail.

More persuasive is Tulloch's delineation of Merryweather's growing obsession with Niamh O'Leary, daughter of an Irish catholic dentist, library colleague, and fictional proxy for one third of Larkin's misogynistic love interest, Maeve Brennan. Merryweather/Larkin's cognitive dissonance respecting women is neatly drawn; making allowances for the status of women generally in the fifties, we witness a catalogue of unacknowledged inconsistencies.

The objectivisation of Niamh - Arthur mentally undresses her at every opportunity - and the appearance mid-narrative of a hidden, occasional sexual partner (otherwise Monica Jones), are to some extent ameliorated by a sincere love story. Shared bicycle-clipped journeys around the flat hinterlands of a town at the end of the world remove the narrative to a plain of fumbling, On Chesil Beach naivety, where the good manners ('beg pardon' applied at every turn) and reticence of a bygone era get in the way of passionate declaration.

Finally breaking through the permafrost of hopeless self-restraint, Arthur finds his own metaphor to describe the sense of release, in a genuinely affecting epiphany on Niamh's doorstep:

"'I knew you were a poet.'
All at once, the puppeteer had been overthrown - he was reaching out to her. Her hand was reaching out too. Now the hands were shaking. Then, just as his other hand was edging over to tenderly take her cheek - 'I'll see you tomorrow then, Arthur,' she said stepping back.
'Yes, indeed. Tomorrow.'"

The rendition seems authentic to the originating figure, and in a novel that continually reinforces its own sense of debt we can only measure verisimilitude. The pinched, curmudgeonly Arthur, given (not entirely successfully here) to a radical over-enthusiasm for swearing, and a sociopathic tendency to keep others at a distance, is also capable of great humour and warmth. The narrative is punctuated with frequent letters to his mother, and to a nameless writer friend - a variation on Kingsley Amis - to whom the newly-published poet vents about his appalling digs, and even more appalling, Blackpool-stereotype landlady, now referred to as 'Old Ma Glenners' in characteristic post-war vernacular.

Mr Bleaney, whose own narrative dissipates as the story progresses, is an alter ego. The insurance salesman whose life mirrors Merryweather/Larkin's own, is a product of the latter's imagination, and unknown, tangible only through anecdote, to the former. For Merryweather, Bleaney is a poem waiting to be written.

The anticipation of poetry gives meaning and purpose to a future which is already vouchsafed; the newly-published Arthur, whose aspirations so impress the instinctive Niamh, is finding poetry as he finds his feet in this smelly town on the East coast of England. Every action cauterizes a potential poetic reaction in the mind of the fledgling poet: a touchingly drawn visit to Niamh's church late in the novel is the clear catalyst for a poem which defined Larkin's own inherent ambivalence towards churchgoing. 

The unambiguous title of this well-wrought 'fiction' nails any doubt as to affiliation, and only a writer of extraordinary perspicacity and ambition will breathe organic life into this most elusive and speculative of poets. If that is possible, Tulloch succeeds to some degree: with great humour, and extensive research, he envisions a life, a city and an era running parallel to knowledge drip-fed through the cannula of biography.

A sense of becoming defines Larkinland, and in an examination of the embryonic fumblings of a poet, a poem is about to be formed, 'like something almost being said'
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