Dublin and New Haven have, these days, more in common than one might expect: a lively downtown scene animated by the presence of a large number of young people, both college kids and their slightly older IT brethren, looking for action in the bars and nightclubs; the centrality to the life of the city of a number of excellent colleges and universities; and the presence of a ring of rather sedate suburban communities full of young people anxious to escape them. But perhaps in the very long run the most important connection will turn out to be the arrival here of a first-class Irish literary talent, Barry McCrea, who focuses on all this material in his new fiction. Let us hope New Haven (which is to say Yale) can overcome its ingrained prejudice towards assistant professors, and hang on to him!

McCrea's debut novel, The First Verse, a story of real moral and aesthetic complexity, is worth comparing to the early work of one of his heroes, James Joyce. Like Joyce's famous Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this is a "bildungsroman": a story of what it is to come of age. What happens as one suddenly and shockingly becomes aware of a world beyond? What happens, at this exciting moment, to one's hitherto suppressed questions about one's sexuality, and how does one begin to deal with the ancient questions of the meaning of life ? As does Joyce's novel, the book plays expertly indeed with our expectations of the genre, and, again like Joyce, it is both highly allusive (in a most unusual fashion, which I will explain), and immaculately well written.

The obvious question arises: why should a writer of such brilliance have to go abroad to get his book published ? In the last section of the book itself we get at least a partial answer: the first person to whom the hero feels he can unburden himself of his painful story is a kind and dispassionate American (yet another Joycean theme -- almost all Joyce's real confidants and supporters as he was writing his books were Americans).

In the main part of the novel there are three distinct "normal" worlds, from each of which the young narrator, Niall, will gradually detach himself: the comfortable world of the southern suburbs where Niall has grown up, peopled by his family and school-friends; the Dublin world of young gay men, one of whom, an easygoing working-class man, Niall falls for, and then, like everyone and everything else, drops; and the world of undergraduates in the college, Trinity, where he has been given a scholarship and which he gradually abandons.

One feature of this normal world is the quite astonishing ubiquity of alcohol; endless pints, and whisky, and vodka tonics; endless drunkenness and hangovers. The abstemious Leopold Bloom muses, in Ulysses, about the impossiblity of crossing Dublin without passing a pub, but McCrea's Dublin seems to be nothing but pubs and bars and night-clubs, all crowded to bursting point. Alcohol is, apparently, the only thing anyone spends their Irish Tiger money on. Interwoven with this compulsive and addictive conviviality is the mobile, with its constant stream of texts and left messages, which Niall will increasingly fail to respond to, and which he eventually will toss into a canal.

This novel is, then, appropriately enough, an account of an addiction, an addiction which turns out to be even more powerful than alcohol, and at the same time, one which completely cuts the addict off from all conviviality. It is the story of a young man's deliberate and willful self-entanglement with, and eventual self-extrication from, a cultic group, named, with a rather dreadful irony, Pour Mieux Vivre, devoted to a modern variant of the ancient practice of divination.

Instead of using as a divinatory resource a well-known set text, such as Virgil or the Bible, this group uses any text that happens to come to hand. A passage, or a group of passages in which the texts become blended into a pure stream of language, deliberately robbed of context or syntax, plucked at random and then made to divulge an occult content by the practice of a quasi-religious art-ritual. As things progress, this practice rapidly becomes an all-consuming obsession, and the cultists, including our narrator, drop all outward concerns, friendships and occupations, spending their days wandering the streets and pubs with their book-bags, sad parodies of the Baudelairian flaneur, moving from place to place driven by the magical "synchronicities" they discover in the books they carry with them for the purpose, and, eventually, from anything at all, the text on a bus ticket or a snatch of overheard conversation, returning at night to their lair lit by candles, drinking the holy potion, Southern Comfort, and surrounded by piles of books. Their obsession is driven by the hope that they will if they persevere be permitted to ascend to the next "level", where they will be, presumably, vouchsafed a fuller vision of the Truth of Things.

One consequence of this topic is that scattered through the book are some 50 or 60 short excerpts from other books, as chosen by the cultists. They are of a wide range, some easily identifiable (Tolstoy, Carroll, Joyce, the Vulgate Psalms, Flann O'Brien, several Elizabethan sonneteers), some less so (Ellmann's biography of Joyce, Sebeok's Encyclopaedia of Semiotics), some from Irish folksongs and Gaelic rhymes, and some from commercial books, such as travel guides. Such an eminently literary topic might have led a lesser writer into a satire of contemporary literary studies, with its myriad interpretive strategies, but McCrea is after bigger game, for, at its heart, this brilliant and disturbing book is a study of the engulfing power of visionary religious experience.

This experience is rendered head-on, undiluted and unexplained: the major climax has the three cultic adepts walking on water! We are left to cope with these experiences as best we can, for the narrator does not seek to debunk them. He does gradually, however, come to see the whole experience as dark, as a breakdown of human relationships, and as an addiction needing drastic cure. In the last section of the book this cure is finally effected, as I have mentioned, by Niall's dispensing with all the lies he has become accustomed to telling his normal friends and parents, and unburdening himself to an American student from Princeton whom he meets in Paris, where he has travelled in a desperate final effort to achieve some kind of sanctity. In effect it is a literary solution to a literary addiction.

Niall is set up for his absorption into the cult in three ways: by his painful baptism into sexual passion, by a series of uncanny visitations, and by a short passage from Ulysses. He has, over the last few years in his secondary school, developed a totally unrequited passion for a popular boy called Ian, (the Scots form of John). As he arrives in college he is still trying to get over this. And at that moment he has a visitation (I use the word advisedly) from an immensely attractive, playful, figure who calls himself Pablo Virgomare (a name which conveniently combines Paul with the Virgin Mary), who largely confines himself to singing, from a distance, verses from the old English song that begins "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clemens," after which he always manages to dissolve into a crowd, leaving Niall panting for more, and hearing echoes from the song all over the place. Pablo shows up again and again, his hallucinatory character never quite experienced as such, and it is when Niall finally registers the significance of the last verse of the song, "I do not know, say the great bells of Bow," that he able to finally break the evil spell under which he has been laboring.

Ulysses shows up at his first encounter with the cultists, where their practice appears merely as a kind of partygame. Niall poses a question as a kind of test: "Where do my parents live?" and when he picks up a copy of Ulysses at random, and opens it, his finger comes to rest on the passage in the first chapter where Stephen is suggesting to his roommate Mulligan that, lacking milk, they should put lemon in their tea. Mulligan replies: "Oh damn you and your Paris fads, I want Sandycove milk." Sandycove is, in fact, where Niall's parents do live, and so Niall is hooked. He will also, in fact, become decisively unhooked when the same passage crops up at the end: whereas the other cultists give the passage a typically bizarre reading, taking it to mean that they should set off for Rome, he, more sensibly, takes it as an indication that he must go home, which, to our intense relief, he does.

Although I have tried to give some sense of the general structure of the book and of its intentions, I have not, I hope, spoiled it for the reader. Indeed, I have barely scratched the surface of this rich, dense and absorbing novel. I hope I have suggested, however, that, particularly as a first novel, it is an astonishingly ambitious and successful piece of work.

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