Too many books in one

`Writers aren't people exactly," Cecelia Brady says near the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. And then she adds: "Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person." Joseph O'Connor can be very good indeed, but the trouble with his new novel is that it's a whole lot of books trying so hard to be one book.

Principal among these is a thriller, as middle-aged satellite dish salesman Billy Sweeney seeks personal revenge against the young thug who, during a violent robbery, helped put his daughter into a coma and then absconded from custody during the ensuing trial. Will Billy find the thug, and, if he does, what will he do to him?

For the first two hundred pages, that seems to be the basic novel you're reading, and very expertly achieved it is, too, with a real urgency to the story's development, so that you really do want to know what happens next. And you also find yourself complicit with Billy, who narrates the action and whose outraged hunger for retribution is the understandable reaction of any parent on whose child such devastation has been wreaked.

When he elects to hire a goon to do most of the dirty work for him, your complicity becomes a little uneasy, but you understand the decision here, too, because, after all, it's what you've also sometimes fantasised in the event of such an appalling thing ever happening to a loved one of yours.

Already, though, the book seems to be pulling in other directions, intent on exploring feelings of loss and of guilt - loss of a much-loved daughter and of a wife killed some time earlier in a car accident, loss also of an idealistic boyhood and of a longed-for marriage that went disastrously wrong, and guilt at the part played by the narrator's alcoholism in destroying his family. The writer deals with these vividly and movingly, and you regret that the exigencies of the thriller format don't allow for their fuller exploration.

Other things start to niggle, too, especially the constantly reiterated mantras regarding salesmen, which irritate as much as they bewilder: "A good salesman remembers his hard lessons"; "A good salesman can tell believable lies"; "A good salesman can sell anything"; "A good salesman has an instinct for anticipation"; "A good salesman will expect the unexpected"; "A good salesman can read a face"; "A good salesman tries to keep a clear mind." These occur every few pages and if there's a point to them (and, indeed, to the book's title), it eludes this reader.

Nonetheless, for these first two hundred pages, you remain wholly absorbed. Then out of the blue, at the beginning of Part Two, the narrator goes completely off the rails, and so does the book. A would-be avenger becomes captor instead, gloating at first and then fearful of his quarry, at which point the irresistible thought occurs: why doesn't he just call the cops? Then the quarry in his turn becomes captor, and the thought occurs: why doesn't he simply kill his former tormentor?

But the book by now has strayed very far from its scrupulous observance of character and has lurched headlong into the world of Robin Maugham's The Servant, John Fowles's The Collector and any number of Pinter plays - role-reversal, the mutual dependency of antagonists, the interchangeability of identity, that kind of thing.

The trouble is, it makes no sense whatever, either dramatically or in terms of how the characters have been presented up to this. A twist too far, except that by now it's at least three twists too far. A pity, because the Dublin that Joseph O'Connor evokes has a compelling immediacy and the first couple of hundred pages are the real thing.

John Boland is an Irish Times columnist