When David Lalé left university six years ago after studying English, he thought about writing a history of spectacular failures. Thumbing through a tome about suicide in literature, he came across a reference to Arthur Cravan, a nephew of Oscar Wilde. Intrigued by what he found, David began piecing his life together from books which mentioned him, building up a picture of a man who was a self-destructive cultural provocateur, poet-pugilist, conman, forger and art critic.

Born Fabian Lloyd, he changed his name to Cravan when he moved to Paris in the early 1900s and had several different personas and passports. When the First World War began, he moved to Barcelona, then New York and finally Mexico to escape being drafted, eventually disappearing off the coast of Mexico in 1918, although there were reported sightings of him for years afterwards. He seems to have been an unsettling, rather horrible person, which is perhaps why he was such a favourite in Dadaist circles.

Cravan's story became a novel, Last Stop Salina Cruz, with a narrator retracing Cravan's steps 90 years after his death. It is a neat conceit, carried along by David's impressive research and brilliant writing, seamlessly interweaving the two stories.

The journey took three months. "I tried to do it in as authentic a way as I could, similar to the way Cravan did it, in today's day and age, which obviously is a totally different world. I did it on a shoestring and hitch-hiked my way around." Overall, he really enjoyed the experience. "I like the challenge that comes with doing something in a difficult way. What I like to do is step out of a comfort zone," he explained. "I quite like putting myself in difficult positions and doing stupid things, like hitch-hiking to Barcelona." It certainly adds a level of veracity to the book.

So what made him want to write it as a novel, rather than a straight biography?

"What's interesting about Cravan is that he's like an almost living fiction, who turned himself into a tall tale. The fascinating thing about his story is that it's totally open-ended, which seems to encourage people to fictionalise him. I was interested in what all the biographers were saying about him. What they wrote about him really reflected on them, so therefore I wanted to write a book about somebody interpreting his story."

The book, written in the first person, begins with the narrator leaving his girlfriend. As we accompany him on his journey, it soon becomes clear that he is manic-depressive, borderline suicidal, who views everything through a dark depression. There are parallels between his life and that of Cravan.

David said: "The story of Arthur Cravan is a story of self-destruction, but an incredibly extravagant kind, almost a celebration of self-destruction, so it's the kind of thing that would very much appeal to this character, who is running away from his life and sort of going towards a dark ending."

The narrator's journey, enhanced by murky, semi-abstract photographs that exemplify his state of mind, is a very absorbing part of the book. Particularly enjoyable are the little vignettes on different oddball characters that he comes across, some of whom are based on real people that David met while retracing Cravan's steps.

During the interview it becomes clear that David's sense of humour and mine vastly differ. While he sees elements of the narrator's story as darkly comic, I found his relentless bleakness sad. "I always saw it essentially as a comedy. It's not a humorous subject, but I don't think that means you can't laugh at it," he said.

Whether you get the humour or not, it is a book that works on many levels; as a travelogue comparing two epochs, an exploration into mad behaviour and bad relationships, and as an impression of a group of bohemians increasingly operating on the far fringes of society. Overall, it is an amazing debut by this 27-year-old.

David recently completed a documentary-making course at the National Film and Television School and is down to the last three in a competition to secure funding for his next documentary. He divides his time between London, where he works part-time at the National Film Theatre as a projectionist and Oxford, which is where he grew up. "It's really nice to come out here where it's so quiet and relaxed," he explained.

He plans to combine writing and documentary-making. "Writing is so inward-looking and making documentaries is totally the opposite. It's about looking outside yourself and dealing with unpredictable things" he said. "They complement each other in a really good way for me."