Ciaran Carson sits at his desk rolling one cigarette after another. The walls of the study where he writes are lined with books. Outside, north Belfast is colourfully spread out in a sectarian patchwork of territories.
Born and brought up on the Falls Road, Carson dwells on that blurred line between the two major identities of Northern Irish society. Not only does he literally live in an interface zone between a Catholic and loyalist area of north Belfast, but even his name signifies a certain ambiguity. Carson explains that one of his Protestant forebears converted to Catholicism, while his father's enthusiasm for the Irish language resulted in his Gaelic Christian name. The product of this mixed cultural marriage is a man as difficult to pigeon-hole as the work that he creates.
His latest offering, Fishing for Amber, is neither a collection of short stories nor a novel in any familiar sense of the word. Made up of a labyrinth of tales within tales, the work draws on a myriad of sources, from the traditional Irish folk tale to Ovid's Metamorphoses. As one story leads to another though a process of loose association, the narrative is propelled forward, always returning to a central series of tales that are being told by a single narrator over seven nights.
"At the end of the day it's a long story. You aren't able to say it's a novel. You could call it an extended essay, an essay being an exploration of things, an attempt to say things . . . it's a book."
Its fragmented nature and pastiche of styles appears to leave the reader adrift in a sea of unrelated discourses - but Carson defends the book against such an accusation. "All stories are made up of fragments. All stories are a bit of this and a bit of that. All stories will involve stories inside each story."
The influence of Flann O'Brien's At- Swim-Two-Birds is openly acknowledged by Carson. But beyond that, it is the influence of his storytelling father which looms largest in this book's pages. Not only is Fishing for Amber dedicated to the late William Carson, but its central set of seven stories over seven nights are themselves told by a character who appears in a story being told by the author's father. It is Carson's childhood memories of his father's stories that breathe life into this complex weaving of fact and fiction. "I remember as a kid that before we went up to bed, we would gather all around for a story. It could be a story in episodes, an episode one night and an episode the next night. You got up then in the morning and went to school and episode three, or whatever, was still in your mind, so that in the course of your humdrum, ordinary day at school you'd be still living in the story. The line between lies or truth or fact, or whatever, were kind of hazy."
Myths of origin and historical fact are all open to question. Many contesting accounts are given of events, of how Lough Neagh originated or of how the telescope was invented. A recurring examination of the 17th-century Dutch Republic depicts a near ideal state sponsored by the House of Orange, the ironic sub-text being that the modern Orange Order contains within itself the republican ideal of liberty while finding quite a different manifestation in modern Northern Ireland. Carson has created a work that, while not explicitly political, cannot but generate echoes of Ulster.
Carson spent his days researching in the libraries of Belfast, returning home to weave his discoveries into the fabric of the final text.
"It was done on the hoof, as it were. You'd go to the library each day, and just poke about at random. The research and the writing were done hand-in-hand. Each day I didn't know what was going to happen. There's a thing called a "library angel" when you're hunting for something and you don't know what it is. You go to the library and your hand goes to a shelf. The angel is standing at your shoulder and leads you there."
The fact that Carson is a traditional Irish music expert and an accomplished musician may also help explain the book's construction, which is reminiscent of a night's session of improvised traditional music, one tune leading to another. "Events remind you of tunes that remind you of songs that remind you of stories that remind you of something else," he says. If T.S. Eliot's poetry was inspired by jazz, with Carson it's all jigs and reels.
Yet, for all that the book draws from the traditional story or ballad, there is no denying that it is a difficult and "learned" work in parts. "To me there's no odds between a tune played well and a poem done well or a sport played well. It's about style. You can have style in all things. If you watch a hurler playing very well - and I adore hurling; it's such a beautiful, skilful game - it takes years and years of practice to become good. Well, writing's the same. If you want to learn how to become a writer you observe how it's done, you read things and you go into your own room and you do it over and over again. It could equally be said that hurling is an obscure, arcane game that people do not want to be concerned with."
In its kaleidoscope of folk tales, mermaids, demons and saints, Fishing for Amber sees Carson's cup of language overflow, making us drunk on his imaginings. His hope "that the audience will say it's a good yarn" seems sure of fulfilment. In a book that contains the world in all its variety, there has to be something for everyone.
Fishing for Amber, Granta Books, published November 11th, £14.99 in UK