This first novel by a young Irish novelist (born 1968) won the 1996 Kerry Book of the Year award at Listowel. Like many first novels, it depicts the coming of age of a protagonist, but otherwise avoids predictable terrain. There are no days in a convent school recounted, no puritanical nuns, no scenes of college parties where sexual repressions are cast off or confirmed.
Instead, Isolt, aged sixteen, goes off to France to au pair for a summer, and never comes home. She disappears into a cosmopolitan melting pot of drifters, drug addicts, beggars and pushers. We meet her when she has been living like this for four years.
This alternative rite of passage is underpinned with symbols of maps and guide books to show how there is no precedent for Isolt's odyssey. She is unlike the au pairs we meet in earlier novels by Maura Laverty and Kate O'Brien, where sheltered Irish girls arrive at their destination with loaded trunks, to be met by their protective employers. Isolt's itinerary involves unplanned departures, where trains are missed, large quantities of drink and drugs are consumed, luggage is stolen or lost. She arrives in a new city with nothing to her name and nowhere to go: "How to find a friend ink Paris. Does your guide book tell you this?"
Emer Martin eschews the easy option of glamorising this world of insecurity, hunger, dirt and the ruthless selfishness of the drug addicted (not to mention how to deal with cramps and heavy menstrual bleeding when you are living on the street). Neither does she show this as an arena into which these young people are forced. It is a lifestyle taken up increasingly by middle class youth, who are uninterested in routine (an Irish drifter says he is growing bored by the repetitive business of begging it is becoming too much like a job).
Martin has a deft capacity for cameo. The various characters Isolt encounters, from the one legged Welsh punk, Taffy, to the motormouth Iranian, Ali (who gives up drugs for the charms of a born again Christian) are described with authentic, empathic and often humorous detail.
Unfortunately Isolt's finely tuned capacity for "witnessing" renders her vulnerable to a virtual take over of her consciousness by Christopher, an American pusher and heroin addict: "She feared most of all the return to the attic room stacked with his refuse. It was akin to walking in his mind . . . She submitted to his sordid appetites without a whimper . . . Her own unconscious did not have the map home." Particularly strong is Martin's description off Christopher's paranoid, bullying personality and Isolt's helpless fascination that leads her to enter knowingly into a sado masochistic relationship with him.
Throughout the book, Martin uses surreal analogies of Christianity. Christopher is deliberately named and his age (33) is no accident either. He has a string of all male apostles, and sells fantasy heaven to youngsters with the drugs he peddles. In case we didn't spot the parallel, however, Martin rams it home too stridently and too often. Isolt is on a quest for an alternative map to conventional Christianity and its shadowy counterpart as illustrated by "Mr Monk" Christopher. She finds both equally patriarchal and oppressive. She is outraged by the Christian God allowing the crucifixion of his own son; and similarly appalled when Christopher deserts his dying friend Freddie (whom he says he loves like a son) to avoid thugs who are looking for blood because Christopher has not paid his drug debts. They beat Freddie to death.
By the end of the book, Isolt is evolving her own woman centred vision, her own map of living, where she is "a daughter on the outside". She sees no option but to keep travelling, snail fashion, with her belongings on her back and her faith tied to her own self sufficiency. She does not, like the literary au pairs of yore, return to the land of her fathers and settle down.
Isolt's conclusion that the endless highway of displacement is more powerful than love, albeit melodramatic, is an insight relevant to the increasingly mobile and rootless younger generation (and was so tellingly explored in the recent devised plays by John Crowley for Bickerstaffe: True Lines and Double Helix).
While Breakfast in Babylon has its flaws it should have been rigorously pruned, for a start this debut novel manages to articulate the disaffected insights of a new generation with occasionally memorable power.