Books: The unbelievable tooth

Sad Bastard by Hugo Hamilton Secker pounds 9.99

Pat Coyne, ex-Garda, invalided out after a fire in which he acted heroically but unsuccessfully, is now searching for himself. The same Pat Coyne features in Hamilton's previous Headbanger. Coyne muses much on the nature of identity and is given to brooding on the losses that each life must inevitably suffer. He is a man weighed down by the past, his own and Ireland's. He is in therapy after the accident, but he flatly refuses to be healed.

Pat imagines himself to be a motor-force of his own life, but in reality other, less worthy characters are driving the action. His son, Jimmy, has a talent for getting into trouble. The event which defines the scope of Sad Bastard, if not its focus, is the squalid death of a minor character by a truly evil, if small-minded, crook named Mongi O'Docherty (Mongi, we learn, means toothless in Irish). Jimmy witnesses it and makes off with Mongi's money. This inevitably sets off a little whirlpool of activity which somehow draws in everybody in this small community. Most entertaining of these is the policeman, Sgt Corrigan, who encounters "a conspiracy of ignorance". Dogged and always one step behind, he is somehow as much an Irish archetype as Coyne, and Hamilton writes of him with a loving intensity - the description of him settling down for lunch caused me to eat my sandwiches prematurely on the train one morning.

The writing is very fine throughout the book, but there is something unsatisfying about its construction. The relation of Coyne's psychology of stalled momentum to the almost thriller-like plot motor is too diffuse. Coyne's main desire is to get back together with his estranged wife, Carmel, but my main desire was to get back to the crook and the policeman. While Hamilton has thoughtful ambitions, the style of the book is what is now called black comedy, which is to say that it employs the rhythms and cadences of humour without going so far as to be funny.

But that said, the sense of place and the dynamics of these little lives are wonderfully vivid and there is nothing lazy about Hamilton's writing. If the desperate need of the interior voice is at odds with the casual violence outside, perhaps that is the vision of Ireland that Hamilton was after all the time.