BOOK REVIEW / Cain's cathedral mired in mud: Banished children of Eve - Peter Quinn: Hamish Hamilton pounds 14.99

HALF-WAY through Peter Quinn's bold debut novel, set in New York in the weeks before the 1863 Draft Riots, an impoverished farmer remarks: 'It was Cain built the first city and it's his sons and daughters who inhabit it.' Certainly, there's little room for goodness amid the squalor Quinn evokes so powerfully in this story of Irish immigrants trying to survive in what they imagined would be the Promised Land at the time of the Civil War.

Quinn describes the poor unsensationally, but he creates strong central characters. These banished children of Eve - the phrase, from a prayer to the Virgin Mary, is applied to the city's dispossessed by Eliza, an African American prostitute turned actress - all have to hustle to make a living. Jimmy Dunne, the petty criminal; Jack Mulcahey the blackface minstrel performer; and Charles Bedford, the stockbroker gambling his life on a Southern rather than a Union victory - each has a desperate existence, only one wrong move away from disaster.

As in Doctorow's novels, New York is a central character, a city on the brink of massive growth and change. Irish labourers are carving out Central Park's slopes and lakes in an unprepossessing part of the city, while Archbishop Hughes's grandiose plans for a cathedral are mired in mud in the centre of speculatively built brownstones. The massive skeleton of the cathedral, abandoned in this wasteland, is a gloomy but striking image; Hughes is but one of a series of real historical characters who appear in the novel. Stephen Foster, the composer who gave away the songs that America grew up with, also staggers drunkenly across its pages.

Neither Foster nor Hughes have a role in the central narrative, but Quinn is less concerned with relevance than with building up a patchwork of stories which loosely cohere. Everyone has a tale to tell, and Quinn makes sure that they tell them, in such detail that the background stories seem to take up most of the book. It doesn't matter. Quinn is a powerful storyteller who handles a formidable amount of historical exposition extremely well. William Kennedy's Quinn's Book may be a quirkier account of New York, but this Mulligan's stew of a book is an assured and auspicious debut.