Nicholas Royle's protagonist, Paul Kinder, teaches creative writing at a university in north-west England and is obsessed with first novels. He runs a course on the subject; collects them in the old Picador editions; and wrote one of his own, now long forgotten. Royle teaches creative writing at Manchester, and he too is interested in first novels. So far, so straightforward. Yet First Novel is anything but. Neither, of course, is it Royle's first novel.

These days Paul lives alone. His wife left him after he had a brief affair with an ex-colleague. His time is taken up instead by Lewis, a man he met at a barbecue and who hasn't left him alone since, and a couple of particularly demanding female students.

Each element of Paul's life, past or present, is a different narrative strand, interwoven with what we're led to assume are the stories his students are writing. But Royle is not simply piecing a jigsaw together  his narratives slowly bleed together, offering illumination or muddying the waters. It's an intricate story with an unsettlingly noirish effect.

This feels like a novel that has been waiting to happen. A couple of years ago, the Observer critic Robert McCrum wrote an article wondering why the burgeoning of university creative writing courses in the UK hadn't been accompanied by an equivalent burgeoning of novels that addressed this phenomenon. We've had campus novels (most notably those of Lodge, Jarrell and Bradbury), but where are the creative writing novels? Well, here's one, perhaps the first.

Nicholas Royle is a seasoned hand at the creative writing workshop, currently teaching the subject at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a writer who specialises in the overlap between reality and fantasy (this is not his first novel, but his seventh). In many ways he is the ideal author to tackle the creative writing workshop, an environment in which a small group of people live in each other's imaginations for so long that they usually end up dreaming they are characters in each other's novels. Royle's protagonist, Paul Kinder, also teaches creative writing at a university in Manchester. When we first meet him he is dismantling his near namesake, an Amazon Kindle, in a delightful analogy of the kind of analytical techniques that his students are learning. Never mind a Kindle, how does a novel work? And more importantly, once you have deconstructed it, will you be able to put it back together again?

At first things move slowly, but with a curiously compelling sense of purpose. Kinder seems to be an intensely solitary figure. He lives alone, gazes for long spells out of the window, drives around at night, exploring the car parks beneath the flight paths of planes making their final approach to the airport. By day he teaches lethargic undergrads, answers emails, tidies his garden, goes to friends' barbecues, and obsessively peruses his collection of cuttings from the Guardian Writers' Rooms series. As the author of a long-forgotten first and only novel he examines the photographs of famous novelists' workspaces looking for his own tome on their bookshelves. He never finds it, though he does notice that Hilary Mantel has the same desk as Andrew O'Hagan and Antonia Fraser, and that a surprising number of writers get by without castors on their chairs (he names several, including Colm Tóibín and Martin Amis). "I imagine their chair legs scraping and dragging awkwardly on rugs, carpets, sisal matting' I could have taken a whole novel of Royle's obsessive and dispassionate observations, but gradually a darker story begins to emerge.

A parallel narrative, written by one of his students, takes us through the life of Raymond Cross, from his time in the RAF, stationed on Zanzibar, where he is involved in a horrific accident during a flying exercise; through to his days as a struggling poet in late-50s London, when magazines such as Ambit were new and edgy. Meanwhile we learn about Paul's past, as he broods on an early affair and the breakup of his marriage. A third thread involves a sinister character with a distinctive laugh whose tirade against drunken airline pilots points to another aviation tragedy, this time involving a light aircraft and a Peak District mountaintop.

The novel then takes some extremely dark and disturbing turns. Both infanticide and geronticide are involved (Dr Harold Shipman makes an appearance), but one of the pleasures of the book is how deftly Royle accounts for this darkness, while managing to weave everything together. Patience with the plot is duly rewarded  the Ray narrative doesn't begin to make sense until we follow the story of Ray's son, and then later his grandson by adoption, and the inevitable overlap between reality and fiction occurs when the student's novel begins to strongly resemble Paul's own life.

First Novel openly displays its influences  at one point Paul imagines travelling to Brooklyn to meet Paul Auster  and just about every novel that involves some sort of metafictional trickery, such as Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, is referenced. But this book is much more than a piece of ludic fiction-making. Much as it plays with notions of narrative and authorial identity, in its meticulous depiction of the landscapes of South Manchester it seems to be mapping a state of mind as much as a city. If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet.

 Gerard Woodward teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.