Robert Cremins is able to view Ireland stereoscopically, having been born and brought up here and having gone to the United States and returned. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and at that hot-bed of postmodernist fiction, the University of East Anglia and he taught in an American Jesuit college. When he came back to this country, he noticed radical changes and a certain enduring sameness in what the narrator of this first novel calls "the incestuous fishing village that is Dublin".
Nobody sees his land and family as mercilessly objectively and as sentimentally subjectively as a self-exiled young native son on his return. Cremin's Doppelganger, one Tomas/ Tom Iremonger, a South Dubliner of the middle class, is enabled to spend a year abroad when his grandfather leaves him 21,000 punts. Tom gets through most of the money with the help of a credit card on a spree of erratic international travel.
"These take-offs and these landings," he observes, "these one-night stands and sublets, these circlings and reversals - put them together and what you've got is a post-modern Grand Tour. And I guess that makes me a post-modern rake." He now uses the occasional Americanism, which is hardly noticeable in modern Dublin. Go figure.
Just before he left the city, an advertising agency, cleverly called Ascendancy, used him as a photographic model for an Industrial Development Authority poster. Thus, on landing at Dublin Airport, walking along the corridor that leads to baggage reclaim, he is welcomed home by his own image, larger than life and illuminated, with the slogan "Our Greatest Resource". It is a poster that the friends he left behind will not let him forget.
Tom arrives at that most stressful time of reunions, the Christmas season, and is immediately caught up in all the demanding traditional gaiety. In a brave attempt to immerse himself in local customs, he plunges into the Christmas-morning swim. " . . . seaweed slimed against my face. And the cold? Even worse than I imagined. The cold was a humiliation, a violation." But there is worse than slime and cold. A video-tape of the event subsequently reveals that Tom has cheated by turning back short of the obligatory turning-point rock.
The incriminating film was shot (of course) by none other than the arrogant St John Strongbow, the rival for the hand of Tom's beloved. Tom called Mainie Doyle "this casual miracle in my life". Regarding her, it seems, with the author's own Jesuit-conditioned vision, Tom sees her as "an a la carte Catholic who one day, I suspect, when she's older and done living and being a very contemporary woman, may just ask for the set menu". It is not comforting when she promises to pray for him - to St Jude.
Tom is a conservative at heart, deploring that Grafton Street's "pedestrianised section was as crowded and close as the Tangier Casbah", and that an old favourite bar, formerly MacSwiney's, was now called Le Cafe Vert. "They'd gutted the place and transformed it into an evil neoart-nouveau bar, all writhing black iron and acid jazz."
Tom has already learned to escalate occasionally from beer and spirits to the preferred designer drug of Dublin's gilded youth. He doesn't get into serious trouble until he considers venturing beyond cocaine. His family and the city's new gangsters make an interesting contrast, which Cremins portrays without hysteria. He writes very well.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic