Critics are always discovering Robert Edric. He is the author of 14 novels under his current nom de plume (he was born G.E. Armitage, and published a couple of early novels under his own name), plus a trilogy of detective fiction. His first novel as Edric, The Winter Garden, won the James Tait Black Prize. His second, A New Ice Age, was runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has several times been long or shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And still, when he publishes a new novel, he attracts reviews saying: “There's this marvellous undiscovered writer...” So, here goes.

Edric's fifteenth novel, In Zodiac Light, examines a familiar theme - the relationship between a gifted individual, traumatised by the experience of the First World War, and the sympathetic psychiatrist trying to treat him - but from an unfamiliar perspective. The individual is not one of the well-known constellation of soldier writers - Sassoon, Owen, Graves - but a more shadowy, mysterious figure: the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, from whose poem In Flaxley Wood, the novel's title is taken.

There are large gaps in the biographical information about Gurney, but good reason to believe that his disorder of mind, imperfectly diagnosed and vaguely described as “neurasthenia”, was not inflicted by the war. It may even have improved during his military service as a private soldier in the Gloucester Regiment. But after the war his mental condition deteriorated to the point where he became an in-patient at the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford, in Kent, where Edric's novel finds him in the care of a young psychiatrist, Dr Irvine.

The City of London Hospital is not, however, the Kentish equivalent of Craiglockhart, where Sassoon and Owen found refuge. Though Gurney's extraordinary talent has powerful supporters - particularly Miss Marion Scott, from the Royal College of Music, where Gurney studied, who is determined that the hospital should host a concert of her protégé's music, it swiftly becomes apparent that the troubled spirits at Dartford are not only those of the patients. The whole establishment is a mass of undercurrents and tensions that eventually become focused on two projects intended to bring an element of order, harmony and sweetness into the life of the hospital and its patients.

The first is Scott's proposed concert of Gurney's music; the second is Dr Irvine's attempt to restore and revive several semi-derelict colonies of bees that he has discovered in the grounds. His childhood was steeped in the lore and rhythms of beekeeping and so, it transpires, were those of one of his colleagues - a nurse, Alison West - and of Gurney himself. The crisis of the novel both reflects and is framed by the evolution of the concert and, especially, of the hives.

Music and the life of bees have in common a kind of secret order, a hidden system of internal organisation; Edric takes this powerful metaphor and spins it into a fiction of extraordinary resonance: a text of secret harmonies, upper partials and complex internal logic, executed in prose of beautiful, foreboding plainness. In Zodiac Light is a remarkable, serious, accomplished novel and Edric an author absolutely secure in the originality of his own voice.

In Zodiac Light by Robert Edric
Doubleday, £16.99; 352pp Buy the book here

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