LIES, manipulation and suspicion are at the heart of Father's Music from the very start. In the no-holds-barred opening scene of this, Dermot Bolger's sixth novel, Tracey Evans, a promiscuous young Londoner haunted by her Irish roots, makes love in a seedy hotel with Luke Duggan, a member of a notorious Dublin criminal family now leading what is on the surface a respectable business and married life in exile.
Swirling Irish reels course through Tracey's headphones not as an accompaniment to passion but as counterpoint. The games that Tracey and Luke are playing, in bed and on their trips between London and Dublin's criminal underworld, are an attempt to find a true note in a world where people predominantly prey on one another. The weapons in these games are love and hate, vulnerability and cruelty, secrets and myths.
After this dramatic prelude, the novel pulses to the rhythm of a taut romantic thriller with the worlds of traditional music and gang warfare as backdrop and on the edge sexuality as the spice. It is the work of a master craftsman, with intricate plotting and the interweaving of characters' lives casting a hypnotic spell. The prose is less convoluted, the time sequence more straightforward and the tone of voice more consistent than in some of his earlier novels, where I sometimes found a self-defeating tortuousness.
Yet it would be wrong to regard Father's Music as just a clever book, a replication of the milieu of manipulation by a calculating novelist. To take just two examples, Bolgers's exploration of the cycles of self-destruction brought about by a wounded childhood and his description of the raw cruelty of old age are convincing and profound while remaining thoroughly integrated into the pacey storyline.
There is, moreover, a depth in Bolger's creation of the character of Tracey Evans greater than the sum of these well-wrought episodes. At her core, she is on a quest for truth and dependable reality when all she has known in her life is hurt, instability and betrayal. She is the fruit of a brief interlude of freedom - a liaison with a wandering Donegal musician - in the life of her equally tormented mother.
Tracey is forever seeking compensation for childhood wounds, looking for the rush of reality in her life, whether it is tearing at her arms during adolescence and leaving herself permanently scarred, tripping on drugs during later teenage years or picking up men for casual sex when she left her grandparents' home after the death of her mother.
Her encounter with the menacing but vulnerable character of Luke in the Irish Centre in London entangles her more deeply in intrigue and corruption, and seems an unlikely avenue for finding truth. But, as the death of, Luke's brother Christy, the self-publicising criminal The Iceman (shades of The General) and her own search for her father, lead the couple on journeys to Dublin and Donegal, it marks the beginning of a strange, redemptive odyssey.
Some of the Bolger landscape is familiar; he presents a dark, jaundiced view of modern Ireland, from which ordinary civic and religious virtues have been banished. Beneath this untrustworthy shell, Bolger explores two potent underworlds, that of criminality, which is anarchic and destructive, and that of traditional music - a secret code of grace in a tawdry, sleazy world.
In depicting Luke Duggan as straddling these two worlds, Bolger runs the risk of implausibility. In the end we, like Tracey, are left to fathom to what extent his sensitivity and vulnerability are real or merely elements in his repertoire of manipulation.
Like the mumbling of Tracey's senile grandmother, Bolger's style carries a strong "register of pain".
In stark contrast with the fast-moving plot, it is "like a scream broken down by computers and relayed in the slowest of slow motions". The only false notes are in the more comic satirical episodes, where sometimes the whiplash of "smart-ass" cruelty and crudity in the dialogue does not ring true.
In the thrilling Donegal denouement, the urban realist Bolger takes a final risk by opening a window on gentle rural redemption. That's the mystery of Father's Music; is it merely an exposure of lies and cruelty or is it a canticle of praise to the power of love?