The author of In Search of Lost Time crops up a lot in Paul Bailey's very sweet, very sad and very short new novel, but it's not only its brevity – a mere 151 pages – that sets it apart from Proust's modernist mammoth.
Shortly after his beloved mother's death in 1927, Dinu, a 19-year-old Romanian, is dispatched by his wealthy father to Paris. The stated purpose for the pale young aesthete is a chance for him to steep himself in Europe's capital of culture, and write. But it seems pretty clear that the tacit aim is to distract him from an acute and consuming grief. Dinu learns much here while busy not writing, not least of the demimonde Proust inhabited and where he is able to discover his transgressive sexuality in a time long before homosexuals – even in Paris – were able to be "gay".
Narrating these formative years from a distance of four decades, Dinu recalls finding "a complicated – oh how complicated – soulmate" in Proust. The master is five years dead when Dinu arrives, but traces of his life remain in the hidden society of forbidden appetites Dinu is drawn to, despite the interdictions of his Orthodox faith, and the ghostly disapproval of his mother.
One afternoon, habits loosened by claret, he takes some of his father's subsidy to commit "a crime against nature and a cardinal sin" at the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, where Monsieur Albert caters to monied gentlemen – including, in the past, a certain Marcel – with unusual tastes. M Albert, enthroned behind a cash box, and scenting the arrival of another of the aristocrats who are "his passion", directs the tremulous ingenue in to see "a beast beyond compare".
Strong and dark where Dinu is pale and spindly, "Honoré" fulfils the wishes he can barely acknowledge. After an overwhelming first experience of sex, the two of them shed their thin French aliases and discover they are both Romanian. Razvan, it turns out, was born a peasant but was adopted rather whimsically by a minor royal, educated abroad and refined out of his original existence before losing his benefactor.
So begins a love that will continue through Europe's convulsions in the coming years, informed by the author's long acquaintance with a tortured nation. Unlike Proust's accounts of delusional passion, the truth of their love is never in doubt, despite the sordid commercial transaction with which it begins.
The story almost challenges us to find all this sentimental, carrying its feeling with an unembarrassed intensity and Romanian sufletul (soul). Cutting against any surrender to schmaltz is a clear-eyed portrait of a country succumbing to nazism. First his cousin Raoul, who had been Dinu's tutor in cosmopolitan pleasure, returns to Bucharest and severs ties with Jewish business; then Dinu hears antisemitic vocabulary begin to poison the conversations of even the most apparently large-hearted of his loved ones.
Loss and grief have been a preoccupation in many of Bailey's novels since his 1967 debut, and they recur here in a narrative that mixes private and public tragedy. What is missing is the amplitude that made the crowded casts of novels such as his Booker-nominated Gabriel's Lament fizz with Dickensian energy, replaced with something more distilled.
In an underacknowledged career, Bailey has mastered the craft of telling a large story through small but piquant details and knowing where the reader can be left to fill in the spaces. His nimble-footed storytelling moves lightly over great distances of time and space to produce something like a Victorian novel in miniature.
• To order The Prince's Boy for £13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
