Shallow in the Deep South

A life evolves, but does not so much expand as lengthen in the case of Finus Bates. Such is his relentless longevity, he manages not only to write the obituaries of most of his contemporaries and often younger townspeople, but can also examine their mistakes, and his own, in detail.

All of this pain and rumination takes place in the town of Mercury, Mississippi. The tone swings haphazardly between southern gothic and magic realism, an observation that is intended more as comment than as warning. Still, it is a hybrid performance that never quite succeeds in being as good as it could be.

Old Finus is a newspaperman and radio show host, but he wasn't always old and was more unrequited lover than career reporter or local radio star. Brad Watson's sporadically impressive first novel finally arrives in the wake of an excellent collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men (1997). As a novel it is longer than it should be and yet Watson throughout strikes with the short story writer's punch.

Sentences, rather than passages, remain in the memory, but Watson ensures that an ancient hurt or a smile from the past will linger. In old age Finus Bates calls to his son, "dead now almost fifty years". Bates briefly emerges as a bereft parent and not merely a likeable caricature. "He wanted to call out, My darling son, my boy! And stood there a moment fixated in the vision of the moment. How was it he was seeing the boy at this time of the morning, when usually he only sensed his presence in distorted slips of air that revealed, like thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead?"

While Watson as a writer has a natural feel for the black and the shocking, he is also drawn to remorse and true sadness. There are moments of honesty, such as when an unloved and unlovable wife attempts to articulate her life's disappointment to husband Finus: " 'I needed you,' she finally said. 'I did need you. I don't know what it is in a man who seems to lose his feeling for someone, that's if you ever really had it, as soon as that person really gives in and lets herself feel something for him. That's what I think happened.' She stared at him, waiting for a response."

Likeable, ineffectual Bates can justify his life of inactivity. He is a dreamer, worse still, a romantic. His fate was sealed as a youth when hidden in river-bank undergrowth and battling his first experience of drunken nausea, he sees a vision. Birdie Wells, a young girl he has know since childhood, falls into the river and having removed her clothes, performs a spontaneous cartwheel. The watching boy's imagination is hijacked for life by a naked girl collapsing into surprised laughter.

Far closer to John Irving than to Flannery O'Connor, with whom Watson has been compared - at least by US critics - the narrative opts for engaging eccentricity rather than sustained drama. Elsewhere, the undertaker's son climbs onto the body of a dead girl. Well, wouldn't you know, she comes back to life. "And after some time, late in the year, the dead girl returned to school." Shy to begin with, the girl is doomed to life in the shadow of her fantastical resurrection: "Wandered from the funeral home like some risen mummy and went straight to the hospital."

Many arguments also take place between the living and the dead up at the local cemetery. Often there are surrealist flourishes, such as when Finus discusses their marriage with Avis, his still bitter dead wife who has taken the form of a cat.

Consistent throughout, though, is the theme of regret. Watson separates his main characters into two carefully arranged camps: the helpless good, such as Finus and Birdie, and the appalling, largely consisting of Birdie's horrible, philandering husband, Earl; Junius, his brutish daddy, and his sex-crazed sister, Merry. The baddies, at least, appear to live and supply most of the comedy.

Birdie's existence quickly dribbles into little more than being the pampered wife of a guilty husband who can do nothing for her except provide material comfort while he seeks companionship elsewhere. Earl dies relatively young but still there is no future for Finus with Birdie. Always friendly to him, she never saw him as a mate as she tells him late in the book, and very late in their long lives: "I don't think I'd have been happy with you . . . you've always been so gloomy."

It is interesting that the real truth teller in this oddly haphazard novel is old Avid who ensures we don't see Finus as a beleaguered hero: "I think something in you makes it impossible for you to really love another person." There is a tough intelligence at work in The Heavens of Mercury, but only a shifting sense of the South as a place, although the voices attempt to provide this. There is little real substance in any of the white characters.

Insufficient use is made of the majestically ambivalent old black witch, Miss Vish, and Creasie, the orphan girl she raised. It is to Creasie, long serving servant, that Watson confers the most profound reflection, "the endless days of nothing but the same, and being nothing but a nigger in the world." Perhaps had Watson looked more to this aspect of the narrative, and played less to the surreal, his disjointed novel would have said far more than it does.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Heaven of Mercury By Brad Watson Canongate, 348pp. £10.99