Fred Johnston's new novel is as much concerned with style as it is with the details of plot and action. One should not be surprised as Johnston, the poet, transfers his poetic preoccupation with finding the best words to say the best things to this meditation on the imaginative growth of a young Protestant lad from a small town in the North of Ireland.
The young man tells his own story of artistic blossoming and his is a lush, dreamlike prose that floats and drifts about his actions and his world. It is an appropriate note to strike on Johnston's part, because it captures perfectly the predicament of this unnamed narrator - this artist-to-be - as he makes the transition from innocence to experience, childhood to adulthood.
Ironically, the world on which that artistic imagination feeds becomes secondary to it. For instance, the violence of the North is made strange and distant, almost theatrical. The world, as the narrator says, is not as real to him as it is to other people. So the reader, who sees this world through the narrator's eyes, is forced to confront a shifting, transient narrative and, like the narrator, try to make sense of it all.
The Atalanta of the title is a recently widowed woman who opens up a whole new world of feeling and sensation for the narrator. Her exotic name comes from a G.F. Handel opera. One of the least successful elements of the novel is this juxtaposition of a narrative about Handel with that of the young boy. While the parallels between two "artist" figures can be interesting, it is ultimately distracting - as are references to Swift.
The tone and theme of this novel owes a great deal, it can be argued, to the work of John Banville. Fred Johnston, though, does not merely imitate or repeat; rather he offers his own - certainly more uplifting - version of that bitter-sweet relationship we all have - artists or not - with the world we live in.
Derek Hand is Faculty of Arts Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD