Aidan Higgins has taken more seriously than most Beckett's injunction to "fail again, fail better", in that none of his books resembles the one preceding it; and this holds true for Dog Days, on one level a circumstantial account of his return to Ireland in 1985 after many years abroad. He has found a new autobiographical vein, one close to the bone, and seem to be renewing himself as a writer in late middle age. Though he is the author of eleven previous titles of distinction, including at least one indubitable modern classic - Langrishe, Go down (1966) - his reputation remains muted, a thing of hearsay among initiatives; for he is unfashionably "literary" and detatched from the more obvious contemporary preoccupations, which he views with scepticism - as he views the "loudly pictorial" future being prpared for us, when the writer's trade will be "extinct as falconry".Higgins's previous book, Donkey's Years, concluded with the deaths of his parents; now, years later, in search of peace and quiet, he returns to the Wicklow coast where he spent part of his youth - perhaps to live there, make it once again his home. But the idea of "home" is problematical, and even accommodation needs thinking about. This was true even in youth when the Higgins family left Springfield House, County Kildare, for lodgings in Greystones, "the seaside resort where Protestants come to die", a locale he recreates here in the fine opening section, "First Love".This 34 page overture is a perfect short novel in itself, remarkable chiefly for its portrait of the sensual if severe Philippa, some years senior to our young and randy protagonist who spends his days contriving occasions of intimacy in trains, sheds and sand-dunes, "the pair of us naked as salmon on the sea shore, panting, our unchained bikes propped up against the broken fence, one lying on top of the other as if engaged in rapt and silent copulation, the heavy Raleigh model on top, the dainty female model underneath." Only once do they attain "bungalow bliss", in a lumber room where "I had rigged up some bookshelves and there was my library, the Shakespeare, the Schopenhauer, the Huxley novels in uniform edition, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy". These makeshift conditions prefigure the contemplative but half housed lifestyle of his whimsical reincarnation, Rory O'Hills, as he calls himself. After considering "a mobile home propped up on bricks in the lee of a dripping pinewood, a Dublin tram cut in half hauled there by tractor", the Brother, an architect of "dream houses", arranges for him to share Ballymona Lodge, Brittas, "a modern bungalow in the Japanese style, ship shape as a yacht", with Dervorgilla Doran (44), single like himself, a brisk outdoorsy type always on the phone, frequently absent - a purely business arrangement; and there Rory remains for two years.He quotes Henry James: "Next to great joy, no state of mind is so frolicsome as great distress"; and there is much here that is frolicsome, notably the flashbacks to Dublin in the "forties and fifties", the Royal Hibernian and the Grafton Picture House; to Connemara, Hampstead, Berlin, Spain and South Africa. The country life around him is frolicsome too, including the behaviour of closely observed locals, some slightly mad. Like Joyce, Rory has an ear for pub talk; like Beckett he is good on the seasons ("the fields in frantic stir at lambing time, placentas blowing about like refuse; saw bullfinch in bush") and times of day and night: "Mist obscures the valley to the door; downpour at 4 am, lightning over hills, moon scudding through clouds . . . in pitch darkness I hear firm footsteps passing by on the road: who? Slept ill: difficult to rise." There are frequent light readings: "Clear sky again after three consecutive overcast days; snow on nearer hills; dark by 4pm, bright evening star; lit wood fire at five, night comes down early."The old mordancy is still there ("Retained semen turns to poison"); he will quote you Hesiod at the drop of a hat ("Crows live nine times longer than man"); he hears blackbirds, "music that would have delighted Messaien"; and there is life yet in the old artsimile: "Combine harvesters working in the dark with powerful headlights; glow of stubble burning in the fields, smoke swirling up; a noctural Turner." Aside from these things he is mostly alone, except when his teenage son James comes to visit, or his friend Anastasia from Austin, Texas, where he once taught Creative Writing ("don't make me laugh").I've said it before and I'll say it again: Higgins's whole practice and attitude are about as far removed as one could get from the naff indistinction of current aesthetics, though it would be wrong to think of him as conservative. No at all; he is, paradoxically, the most blithely subversive of writers, aristocratically unbothered with modish views or conventional appurtenances: "The brother let in the clutch, or whatever it is you let in (I don't drive)", radio, not television, relieves the rural silence. Hollywood movies he finds "alarming", pop music he associates with "servitude"; for, in a gregarious, coercively polyphonic era, his is the tradition of solitary inquiry and reappraisal: of time out and negative capability; of mystical attention, even: "A wren on the fence in the rain; inky clouds at sunset; a white breast feather falls from the sky. Boom of rising wind in the chimney, saw sickle moon."This is the higher vagrancy, out of tune with the world of getting and spending, in tune with an older and larger reality. Homeless, he suggests, is one of saddest words in the language; yet this is not a sad book so much as a waiting book, a book of "mysteries, revealed truths we cannot comprehend".