The sky above, the mud below

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann, Phoenix House, 248pp ,£15.99 in UK

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann, Phoenix House, 248pp ,£15.99 in UK

What a pity Jay Mc Inerney has already used the title Brightness Falls. It belongs rightly to Colum McCann's second novel, which weaves the classical cycle of rise and fall into a mythic fairy tale of New York.

The Walkers are a workingclass, mixed race family who struggle up from the bottom to a modest, if endangered, success in the city; Treefrog is a homeless man, ekeing out a pitiful existence in the savage underworld of New York's subway tunnels, seeking a way to redeem himself.

The novel opens in 1916. A team of workers is constructing the subway under the Brooklyn river when the tunnel they are building collapses. Nathan Walk er, a young black man, sees his best friend, Con O'Leary, an Irish navvy, buried in the ruins on the river bed. Nathan, a solitary 19-year-old, keeps faith with O'Leary's widow and baby and the two, he a black teenager from the south and she a young Irish widow, form a wary but respectful alliance born out of their separate grief. In time, Nathan marries O'Leary's daughter, Eleanor, and raises three children of his own.

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McCann follows Walker's life of hard toil below ground and his life topside through the segregationist Fifties, the prosperous Sixties and into the Seventies when Nathan's grandson takes centre-stage. Clarence Nathan, in rebellious exile from his grandfather's trade, earns his living as a climber - a construction worker with a head for heights who scales the city's skyscrapers. So at one level, this is a family saga spanning seventy years and three generations. But it is much more than that; it is also a meditation on the struggle between endurance and despair.

The small domestic pleasures and modest aspirations of Nathan's generation are juxtaposed with the disastrous dysfunction of Treefrog, a compulsive-obsessive, consumed, ironically, with the notion of balance. The brutal life below ground, with its daily grind of violence and drugs, its ritual humiliations, is unflinchingly documented by McCann. But he does not neglect to show us the tenderness and devotion of this urban Hades, or to insist on its moral code of embattled loyalty. McCann employed the same forked structure in his ambitious but flawed debut novel, Songdogs, but here he has achieved a coherent integrity of style and substance, the two narratives interweaving like train tracks crisscrossing. If his language sometimes veers towards self-consciousness, he rewards the reader immediately with a piercing image - the "geography of hats" worn by the tunnel workers, the streets of the city "thatched by sunlight", the "choreography of commerce towards sky".

In his poetic and atmospheric rendering of New York, he uses a number of tableaux vivants which reminded this reviewer of classic photographic images of the city - a group of street kids showering gleefully in the spray of a fire hydrant, a line of construction workers perched like swallows on a steel girder stretching out into nothingness.

McCann captures perfectly the destructive alienation of Treefrog, the tunnel dweller, his fear and his self-loathing. I was less convinced by Nathan Walker, though he is an intriguing character. A stoic, Faulkneresque figure, he dominates this book and yet remains emotionally unknown, and somehow unknowable. It has to be said that this is a male book. The women seem to hover tantalising, shadowy and fragmented, filtered through the more powerful interior lives of the two male characters. As well as a son, Nathan has two daughters, but they are dispatched with alarming alacrity. But this is an observation, not a criticism.

Colum McCann has never been afraid to take risks, and they have richly paid off here. This Side of Brightness is a commanding, intricate, achieved novel which is as much about the rise and fall of the urban experience, as it is about the life and times of Nathan Walker.

Mary Morrissy is a novelist, and an Irish Times staff journalist