Fiction: Genre writing - including detective stories, historical novels, and women's romance - is a flourishing aspect of contemporary Irish fiction. Claire Kilroy's captivating second novel, Tenderwire, is a striking addition in this regard because of the way in which it skilfully interfuses the literary novel with the thriller.
It combines a finely etched psychological portrait of the emotional turmoil of a young Irish violinist with a fast-paced story of shady deals and double-cross.
Indeed, part of the finesse of Tenderwire is that it is both a page- turner that keeps the reader on tenterhooks until the very end and also that it adroitly and movingly explores the psychosis of loss.
The expertly orchestrated generic shifts add to the vertiginous sense of surprise and discovery in this novel.
Claire Kilroy's female protagonists are connoisseurs of chaos. They readily jettison the everyday and trade it in for a gothic existence in a counter-world full of spies, secret pursuers, hidden menace and doubles.
Yet, alienation is both a state they cultivate and from which they actively flee.
Kilroy's first novel, All Summer, centred on a troubled, amnesiac heroine who was plagued by ghostly mirror selves and also beset by an obsessive love for her sadistic, drug-sozzled brother. A stolen painting acted as an objective correlative for the emotions of the central female subject.
In Tenderwire, the object of desire is a beguiling antique violin of dubious origins.
It is bought on the black market from a Russian emigré in suitably sinister circumstances by Eva Tyne, a young Irish musician who has moved to New York and is a leading talent in a newly founded chamber orchestra. Having invested all of her legacy from her late father, sold her own violin and borrowed heavily to purchase this instrument, Eva is intent on proving that it is a rare Stradivarius despite its lack of official documentation.
The violin gets interwoven in a tale of misadventure in the customary manner of thrillers and is variously identified as a fake, a family heirloom stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family and a genuine Guarneri del Gesù.
More importantly, it becomes entangled with the complex emotional affairs of Eva as she moves between lovers and attempts to come to terms with the loss of her father, who disappeared from the family home in Dublin one night and presumably committed suicide.
An anguished sequence, which describes a concert given by Eva in Cologne and veers in nerve-racking manner between tragedy and farce, uncovers the darkly compulsive roots of her musical gift. Her public performances all aim at entrancing a ghostly auditor, her drowned father.
Displacement and upheaval characterise Eva's personal life. She abandons her Polish lover for a Peruvian investment banker but is tormented by her suspicious jealousy of both of them.
Her obsessive mistrust seems to force her either to visit the abandonment she once experienced on others or to re-stage it in her own life. Only a brilliantly observed and irrepressible cat, Ming, remains her constant, if put-upon, companion.
Tenderwire opens and closes in Ireland in a disintegrating family home that contains disturbing, phantasmal signs of a male presence, such as a pair of empty shoes by the door. Kilroy momentarily suggests that her heroine has retreated to this ominously Gothic abode and wilfully sabotaged her career as a musician.
Emotional resolution and a witty redemption, however, lie in store. Among the many surprises that waylay the reader is an eerie, hallucinatory scene in which Eva's violin, which she has named La Magdalena, comes to life and intercedes on behalf of her owner. The supplicatory tenderness of art, associated with female presence rather than paternal absence, seems to permit a release from the constrictions of identity and desire.
In Tenderwire, Claire Kilroy has written a psychologically astute, gripping and suspenseful fiction. Its twists and turns and frequent switches in mood from comic to tragic mimic the changing modulations of the music of Vivaldi with which her heroine is so preoccupied.
Kilroy is a quirky and excitingly original writer, and this is a delightfully inventive and wholly engrossing novel.
Anne Fogarty is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Drama, University College Dublin
Tenderwire By Claire Kilroy Faber and Faber, 266 pp. £10.99