CrusadersBy Richard T. KellyFaber £14.99, 556 pagesFT bookshop price: £11.51

Is Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders the finest fiction debut of 2008? Too early to say, but there's little doubt that this epic will feature prominently in next Christmas's "books of the year" round-ups. Like the new Eurostar Terminus at St Pancras, this extraordinary state-of-the-nation novel manages to seem utterly of its time, despite the magnificent and unfashionable Victorian structural engineering that underpins it.

The year is 1996, and John Gore, an idealistic Anglican clergyman and sometime Labour activist, returns home to "plant" a church in a poor suburb of Newcastle. Easier prayed than done. Gore's brand of Christian socialism sits uneasily with a congregation sick of do-gooder social workers and cynical about regeneration schemes.

To get his ministry off the ground, Gore accepts help from Stevie Coulson, the bodybuilding head of a local security firm. It's a Faustian pact. But the churchman's undoing only occurs after he embarks on a relationship with Lindy, a single mother from his flock.

Meanwhile the fledgling ministry has come to the attention of Martin Pallister, a former Trotskyite turned New Labour MP, who wants to win Gore to his cause.

Crusaders' cover blurb calls it a "contemporary parable". If it is, it's an opaque one. Kelly's take on Labour, new and old, remains finely nuanced: this book has lots of dog-collars but, thankfully, little dogmatism. Much of its power is descriptive. Kelly brings the less salubrious parts of his semi-fictional Newcastle cinematically to life. He also has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, an empathy with "ordinary" lives and a special ability to convey menace.

At the heart of Crusaders hangs a poser: "Is it possible for a party, community or individual to change (or regenerate) without losing their values and identity?" Crusaders offers no easy answers. But what a magnificent way to put the question.