Fiction: Judith Mok is better known as a successful soprano but she has also published books of poetry and prose in her native Netherlands. Gael is her first fiction in the English language and there is much to admire, not least the lyrical writing, which at times creates a dream-like atmosphere.
Throughout, different narrative perspectives are employed: first and third person voices, and different characters, too, tell their story from their own vantage point. Each voice and perspective intensifies this consciously impressionistic prose. And, as one might expect from an author immersed in music, this is a work intentionally layered with references to musicians and composers, as well as painters and writers.
The Gael of the title is the object of desire for Maria, a young Dutch violinist. He is an Irish artist and attractive to her because of his animal earthiness, so utterly a contrast to the cold and austere world she is used to inhabiting. The blurb on the back of the book suggests that this is a novel about "a particular type of Irish male psyche", but in truth, what is of interest here is the obsessive, selfish nature of the creative imagination that feeds on the pain and hurt revolving around it.
Maria's Jewishness is a factor because of the casual anti-Semitism she encounters - in Ireland, but also in the aristocratic Parisian circles she moves in with her first husband, and also in America. It is a factor, too, owing to the fascinating background stories of her parents and their brush with death in the Europe of the Holocaust. These are some of the more successful parts of the novel, with hidden hurt alluded to and the sense of these long dead men and women haunting the lives of those who escaped the gas chambers.
Some of the least successful episodes are those centred on Ireland. The subtlety of the engagement with European locales and culture is absent when it comes to describing the Irish scene. The country comes across as a wet, unwelcoming place, obsessed with the Catholic religion and where the only thing anyone seems to eat is a fry. It seems to be an Ireland of the past - of 20 or 30 years ago maybe - as opposed to the frothy cappuccino reality of the present moment. But Ireland is not the main focus of the novel, despite the efforts of the blurb to make it so. Ireland is just one location in a narrative where the action glides easily from place to place, from character to character, episode to episode.
Tension is generated through the juxtaposition of this story centred round a highly destructive and dysfunctional relationship with the often delicate prose employed to tell it. It is a strain that runs through the entire work. To be sure, Gael is quite an awful character, but just one such awful character in a book of many such characters. Nobody - not even Maria - emerges as truly sympathetic by the end. Yet both these main characters are capable of producing objects of beauty, of timeless art.
And that is the Lawrentian mystery at the heart of a novel such as this: striking a balance between pain and beauty, between lyrical prose and ugly reality. In a modern world where feeling and emotion are frequently contained and packaged for safe consumption, the kind of raw passion and danger on offer here is certainly worth engaging with.
Derek Hand was awarded a research fellowship 2005-2006 from St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin, where he teaches in the English department. He is editor of a special issue of the Irish University Review (published this month) on the work of John Banville
Gael By Judith Mok, Telegram Books, 176pp. £8.99