The bottom of Blake Morrison's garden was so heavily populated with foxes that he decided to write a novel about them. Although the writer had ideas of what the novel might contain - creation myths, a naturalist's diary, an account of a fox-hunt - he couldn't work out which period to set it in, or how to make foxes interesting to a wide audience.

That was in 1998, and the novel was abandoned soon after it was started. The poet and former literary editor, best known for his family memoirs When Did You Last See Your Father?, switched to other projects.

Then, at the dawn of the millennium, foxes, and the hunting of them, became one of the great political issues of the day, setting town against country, and Morrison realised the novel should be set in the present day. South of the River begins on the morning after New Labour's 1997 victory and concludes five years later. Over 500 pages, the writer interweaves the lives of five characters struggling to cope in the rat race.

Nat is a disillusioned English lecturer, whose wife Libby is trying to stay at the top in the competitive world of advertising. Their marriage falters when Nat meets Anthea, who has submitted a story about foxes. Nat's journalist friend Harry is working for a local paper, covering a court case about a child abduction which makes him focus on his own deficiencies as a father.

At the same time, in Suffolk, Nat's uncle, Jack Raven, is struggling to keep his tractor company afloat in the face of tough competition from Europe. Then his wife becomes seriously ill.

Morrison, who is in his fifties, manages to make all his characters three-dimensional and keep the reader turning pages. It's his first major work of fiction, and the first time he has attempted to write something on such a large scale.

"It took quite a long time to tie the different strands of the plot together, and after that I hoped the reader would start to engage with the characters. My main concern was that the novel would not be a slog to read but, after finishing it, I think it does have a real page-turning quality to it," he said.

"My interest in foxes began in London with urban foxes because when I grew up in a village in the countryside I never saw a fox. I became aware of just how big an issue fox-hunting had become and thought I could focus on it in my novel.

"The debate symbolised how those living in the countryside felt marginalised. There was a lot of talk about people losing their jobs if there was a switch to drag-hunting, and that all the hounds would have to go - but that does not seem to have happened."

After winning accolades as a poet in the 1980s for collections including The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, Morrison became literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and The Observer, before leaving in the mid-1990s to write full-time.

The father-of-three, who lives in Blackheath, often visits Oxford to see his fellow poets Craig Raine, James Fenton and Tom Paulin, and recently appeared at the Oxford Literary Festival.

As a poet, he hopes readers will return to his verse to discover something fresh each time, and he hopes this will be the case with South of the River.

A different section of the book is devoted to each of the main characters, and the author says no one has yet noticed that the opening paragraph of each first chapter is a pastiche of the opening of a famous novel. "The most obvious is the start of Anthea's story, which recalls Kafka's The Trial."

Nat, the lecturer who is supposed to be writing a play but can not finish it, is the character most like the author. "I'm ridiculing myself and other writers I know through Nat."

The drunken lecture Nat delivers at the end of the novel pays homage to a similar episode in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. Despite his inebriated state, Nat makes a point about 21st-century society which Morrison believes very strongly.

Nat tells an astonished audience: "We've become a nation of dumbos and zombies, faddies and fatties, workaholics and shopaholics, abusers and self-harmers. We kid ourselves we're emotionally literate - that we're truly communicating at last, thanks to mobile phones and emails. But it's an illusion: real intimacy doesn't exist; no-one listens, we don't have time for each other, we're all too busy."

Email, Morrison explains, means the phone hardly rings at home now, and as a result there is a loss of "spontaneity and connection".

That is one of the reasons why he began teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London three years ago and he lectures there at least once a week.

Although South of the River took him nine years to complete, it has given him a taste for writing fiction, and he is now sketching out a story about two couples who knew each other in their twenties, reunited for a weekend in a country house.

"This time it will be much shorter," insisted Morrison. "I don't want another nine-year marathon."

South of the River is published by Chatto & Windus at £17.99.