FICTION: The Giftby Cecelia AhernHarperCollins 305 pp £14.99
CECELIA AHERN'S books are rarely reviewed in Ireland. Oh, there are reviews alright, but they tend to end up being reviews of her relative youth, or reviews of her father's job or reviews of how unconvincing the Irish accents were in the movie version of PS I Love You. The books themselves end up being treated as almost incidental, which is a terrible shame. So what about The Gift, a seasonal fable?
I was enchanted before I even opened it. It's the most delightful little silver hardback, patterned with glittery snowflakes and wrapped up in a red bow. It's utterly irresistible, the sort of thing you just have to pick up, and I devoured it in one sitting.
The story opens in the run up to Christmas and Lou Suffern is by his own admission a Busy Important Man. So busy and important that he forgets his father's 70th birthday, he cheats on his long-suffering wife with the nanny, he has never changed his son's nappy even though the baby is a year old and he promises his five-year-old daughter that he'll come to her school play, but at the vital moment ambition gets the better of him and he goes to a work do instead.
One morning when he spends 15 minutes in the street talking to a homeless man, Gabe, he knows himself well enough to acknowledge that this isn't his usual modus operandi. Then he finds himself gathering together a collection of his old clothes for Gabe and before the day is out he's offered Gabe a job - only in the postroom, but nevertheless. Lou is surprised by his own altruism and he wonders about the connection he feels to Gabe and then he understands. "The person behind those crystal blue eyes was remarkably familiar. Gabe reminded Lou of himself."
Aha! I thought: Gabe is going to show Lou his life. But it's not that simple. Gabe is a satisfyingly unsettling, almost malign character: he knows Lou's real name (the shamful Aloysius); he knows where Lou lives. Dark mutterings from Gabe about drunk drivers makes me wonder if Lou has killed someone. Then Gabe produces some mysterious pills which he persuades Lou to take, the upshot of which is that Lou is cloned. Two Lous are in play, Good Lou and Bad Lou, the Lou who takes his wife and family for granted and the Lou who knows there's nothing more important in life than family. Suddenly It's A Wonderful Life has been left far behind and we're in territory that's more usually inhabited by Stephen King.
Ahern has been described by lazy journalists as a chick-lit writer and that may have been true of her first two novels but over the last few, she has carved out her own genre, which could be called magick-lit.
Her plots are impelled not by human beings and their personal volition but by the supernatural, by forces we can't understand and this resonates powerfully in our post 9/11 world. It's the same reason that so many adults read Harry Potter books - we want to believe in a power greater than ourselves but we find traditional religion inadequate for our needs.
Yet, in many ways, this is a dark, angry book with a strident message: by putting work before family and friends, we are wasting our lives. Courageously, the anticipated happy ending is spurned. If The Gift is a fairytale, then it's from the same template used by Hans Christian Anderson.
Nevertheless, we're not left entirely devoid of hope: the moral of this cautionary tale is that if we pay close attention to what it has to teach us, we can learn how to save ourselves. All is not lost.
• Marian Keyes' most recent book This Charming Man was published by Penguin in May this year