Like her debut, Breakfast in Babylon, a breathless tale of a runaway Irish teenager in the druggie squats of Europe and the US, Emer Martin's second book is built around a transcontinental quest. To placate her aged mother, Keelin, the youngest of a large family, agrees to track down her sister Aisling, who has spent 15 years cutting a trail of emotional devastation through Japan, Hawaii, New York and Mexico. Funded by the suspiciously deep financial reserves of her louche Uncle Oscar, and accompanied at various stages by her dysfunctional siblings, Keelin leaves behind the securities of home, such as they are, for the carnival of humanity in the global village.
On the basis of its premise I was prepared to be irritated by this novel, expecting at worst a thinly disguised Ryanair-generation travelogue, at best a smug documentary on the whacky lifestyles of the Irish Diaspora.
Initially the book has its weaknesses. The opening section on the family's miserable past and unstable present is dogged by its concessions to Irish wit 'n' whimsy and to the predictable keynotes of the papal visit and moving statues. It also lurches towards some tendentious state-of-the-nation commentary: "Television, history, and the church; Rome kept their souls, England took their language and their land, and now America had captured their imagination".
But once the Irish setting is abandoned the prose slips these awkward moorings, and Martin begins to flourish. Her characterisation is strong and her dialogue snappy, if still burdened occasionally with a little too much kitsch colloquialism. And her confidence with a layered, high-velocity narrative is impressive, the quest for Aisling reaching Carteresque heights at times in its Rabelaisian pursuit of the erotic, sadistic and anarchic.
If there is an agenda beneath the freefall of the story, it concerns the redundancy of family, including the larger family of national affiliation. Keelin's patchy relationships with her anorexic sister and obsessive-compulsive brother reveal the irrelevance of a kinship structure to individual destinies.
When she eventually locates Aisling, now pregnant and shacked up with her lesbian lover in Central America, the meeting is an ideological confrontation between the rooted, indigenous territorialist and the breezy globalist who has shed the attachments of history, "dethreading its pockets, discarding its loose change". The reunion of the sisters is a lyrical, even ponderous coda to the adrenaline rush of the previous narrative, and a poignant conclusion to an unexpectedly refreshing, if slightly uneven, novel.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin.