A Dickens for the 21st century

Fiction:Like Dickens's David Copperfield, "J" has the gift of seeing ghosts and spirits. Born with a "caul" (a membrane on a newborn's head thought by sailors to be protective), Copperfield was destined to embark on a hero's journey that would give Dickens's 19th-century readers insight into themselves.

In Boy in the World, J too has unusual birth circumstances that set him apart: his dead mother was Irish and his father is an Arab Muslim who still doesn't know he exists. As terrorism grips the world in what Williams describes as the beginning of the third World War, J struggles to reconcile two conflicting identities: Muslim and Christian.

Whether this destiny is a curse or a blessing is one of the questions explored in Niall Williams's gorgeous fifth novel, which pulls together Dickensian plot twists, the philosophy of St Augustine and the collective trauma of 9/11 to create a convincing pilgrimage that an innocent boy must make, thereby giving the reader insight.

It's impossible to discuss Williams without mentioning Paulo Coelho, a spiritual writer to whom Williams can be favourably compared. Near the end of the book, for example, Williams bows to Coelho by having J travel south to Lagos in Portugal, then to the African continent, in a reflection of Coelho's own personal pilgrimage.

With poetic prose that could have been written by angels, combined with a pace that keeps the reader turning the pages, Williams demands that the reader make an Augustinian leap of faith and contravene all rational thought. We are to believe that an Irish country boy could be a new Muhammad/Messiah, bonding within himself the political and religious extremes that polarised with 9/11.

Like Muhammad, Williams's boy saint has been raised by his grandfather. J discovers that his consciousness operates outside time and space, enabling him to communicate with others on an intuitive, non-physical plane. Like Harry Potter, J has a destiny to fulfil that he has no control over. St Augustine would be pleased, but for a generation reared on JK Rowling is this suspension of disbelief possible? Well, if we can believe that Harry Potter slays demons, then why not believe in a boy saint?

The philosophical underpinnings of the novel are accessible, expressed in the way an adolescent would find appealing, giving the novel a potentially wider audience. Why do we exist? Why does God allow evil to thrive? Why doesn't God rescue the victims of evil? And who is God anyway? Jewish? Muslim? Christian? Buddhist? Does heaven have guards and walls to separate the faiths?

While such issues inform the book, the dramatic drive comes from J's decision to reject a belief in God on the day of his Confirmation, and his discovery that his father was an Arab undercover journalist with the BBC. He embarks on foot on an odyssey in search of his mysterious father that takes him from Ireland to the UK to Paris to a harrowing squat hell in Stuttgart, where he meets Williams's version of Dickens's Little Em'ly, a street boy called Nuno.

On the level of pure story, J's journey is fantastic - he arrives in cities at the precise time and place when terrorist bombs are going off and finds himself escorted by a variety of larger-than-life characters. Dickens's Pegotty, the faithful lifelong servant, is mirrored by the nun who decides it is God's will that she protects J, Sister Bridget. Dickens's Mr Barkis, the coachman, arrives in the form of a long-distance lorry driver, Ben Dack, whose destiny, we learn, is to assist J's spiritual journey in unexpected ways.

THE NOVEL'S EXPLORATION of predestination and the role of personal responsibility within it (a preoccupation of St Augustine), seems to be part of a new movement that one might term New Age Catholicism. Both New Agers and the more adventurous breed of Catholic believe that we can exist on a spiritual plane where time and space are irrelevant and the dead speak, while saints walk the earth.

Williams makes repeated references to the value of Dickens as a classic writer who can be read again and again, and clearly sees himself within this literary tradition, while at the same time writing as a visionary who demands leaps of faith from the reader. But Williams needn't apologise for seeking the reader's grace when the reward is a spiritually enriching story of such beauty and magic that it deserves a place not just in the 9/11 canon, but on the Leaving Cert syllabus as well, especially now that Muslim and Irish children are being schooled side by side, as well as learning to live together outside the classroom.

Kate Holmquist is an Irish Times journalist. Her novel The Glass Room was published last year by Penguin Ireland

Boy in the World By Niall Williams Harper Collins, 344 pp. £11.99