IRISH FICTION: Jerome Morris is just 17. His father has died of cancer and he has never met his mother. His half-brother Gary, on a discus scholarship in Boston, returns home to help out.
It is a bleak world rendered here: a world of pavements grey, of drab, undistinguished housing estates. School offers Jerome nothing: the teachers - quite remarkably in an age of pastoral care and counsellors - leave the obviously grieving youth alone: distance and collective ignoring is the order of the day.
There is a lot of alcohol consumed and a lot of unsubtle anger and unwarranted violence on show. Jerome lurches from encounter to encounter, unable to articulate his pain but putting on a mask of adult confidence and knowingness. All he wants, simply, is his Mammy. He takes a trip to London in search of her. A curious feature is the loving detail and the obsessive naming of London town in comparison to the anonymity and the vagueness accorded to Dublin. What might this mean? Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.
This is Gavin Corbett's first novel, and he mostly controls the narrative well. Jerome's voice is central, and he is a half-cousin twice removed to Patrick McCabe's Francie Brady: the outright madness isn't there, but similar difficulties with growing up most definitely are.
One difficulty is in generating drama from a character that is numbed by his experiences: nothing seems to get through. How is a reader to connect with a character so disconnected from everyone and everything round him? There is, also, no sufficient sense of the past set up when the father was alive to differentiate between the then and the now.
Innocence is a novel that is many things at once. It is a story of disaffected youth as well as unnameable grief. It is also, seemingly, a slice of contemporary Irish life where nothing means anything anymore: a place of ever-present greyness, uninspiring, and uninspired. It is a lot to take on first time out. There is just about enough here, though, to suggest that, with some Blakean "experience", more can be expected second time round.
Innocence
By Gavin Corbett
Townhouse, 242 pp, €8.99
• Derek Hand is a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. The Liffey Press published his book, John Banville: Exploring Fictions, last year