Realism always plays fictional games. The truths it conveys depend upon the strength of the illusions that it creates. Dermot Bolger's The Valparaiso Voyage lives up to this complicated brief in full. It fuses a searing reportage of contemporary Ireland, traversing all of its instantly recognisable ills - corruption, racism, provincialism and shameful episodes of emotional and sexual abuse - with the stylised conventions of a thriller.
References to tribunals, overseas bank accounts and the plight of Nigerian asylum-seekers punctuate this fast-paced story of revenge and double-dealing. Fictional violence becomes indistinguishable from the terrible transgressions of real life. The gun brandished in the blood-soaked dΘnouement is not a routinely anonymous gangster's weapon but an IRA revolver with rusty bullets. The chief villain is a descendant of a supporter of Michael Collins.
Bolger's latest fiction is, above all, a telling exploration of the dark aspects of masculinity. The hero, Brendan Brogan, is a compulsive gambler who is haunted by unrelenting memories of the abuse he suffered as a child. Rejected by his stepmother, he is forced to sleep in the garden shed which is used by his father, an urban planner, to store the files of the illegal transactions that he undertakes on behalf of a local politician.
Symbolically, emotional and political abuse intertwine. The father's refusal to defend his son is of a piece with his attitude to power, which is all about "protecting appearances" and shoring up a system that depends on petty hierarchies and backroom deals. These vicious power games are replicated in the local Meath school where Brendan Brogan is persistently bullied by the sons of his father's associates.
Strangely, however, his perspective from the outhouse at the bottom of his family's garden, while fuelling his sense of alienation, also permits him a means of understanding the cojoined workings of male fealty and corruption. The protagonist is befriended by his half-brother, who should be his rival, and initiated into a subversive world of gay sexuality and rebelliousness.
Indeed, Bolger's novel provocatively sexualises all male familial relations and uses homosexuality as a metaphor for the lost bonds between fathers and sons and between male siblings. It seems no coincidence that the main character takes on the identity of his gay stepbrother - who commits suicide in the fashion typical of such characters in novels - after his own assumed death in a train accident. His alibi affords him the possibility of escape from Ireland to a place of imaginary purity such as the Valparaiso conjured up in the well-known Irish poem learnt by generations of Irish schoolchildren.
The Valparaiso Voyage is, however, about the prospect of return rather than of exile. It centres on the involuted legacies of guilt that link the generations in Irish society. The hero returns to avenge his father's murder and to make amends with his estranged son. He succeeds in both aims only by further indicting himself and everyone around him. His affair with a Nigerian woman, who gets unwillingly caught up in his violent score-settling, problematically captures the way in which contemporary Dublin brutalises and manhandles innocent outsiders.
Notwithstanding its savage denunciation of Irish political corruption and burgeoning racism, Bolger's novel is nonetheless insistent, almost despite itself, on vindicating the seemingly failed father figures who have presided over this unregenerate society. Although his is not even a "happily unhappy family", the protagonist still longs to regain respect for his father and to re-establish contact with his son.
His investigations as an avenging detective help him to understand his father's coldness and violence and even to affirm his Fianna Fβil-style rectitude despite his involvement in crooked planning deals. Likewise, his son, whom he discovers to be gay, proves by the very token of his alternative sexuality to have broken the malign cycles of Irish corruption and emotional repression.
In using the raw sociological data of contemporary Irish life as the basis for a compelling and expertly executed thriller, Dermot Bolger has produced a polished fable for our times. The evil perpetrators come, as convention dictates, to a sticky end. But the closure sought by this tale of male self-discovery remains an impossible goal that eludes even the reach of fantasy.
Anne Fogarty is a lecturer at University College Dublin