Sex, love, war, death - in his first novel, Kevin Myers takes on the lot, lobbing some thoughtful arguments about race, identity and personal responsibility into an already potent mix. The result is gratifyingly unpredictable, a roller-coaster ride between Mayo, Louisiana and war-torn Bosnia as his innocent American heroine drifts through the last decades of the 20th century trying to gather wisdom from experience.
Gina is a 19-year-old student in 1972 when she first visits Ireland. Perhaps she is "confused by the way the Irish transform acquaintance into intimate friendship", but when she falls head over heels for the handsome half-Yugoslav, Stefan, she claims she is on the pill. Wonderful sex ensues (all the men in this book make love rather well) and Gina goes home to her crazy southern belle mother pregnant with Tom. Contact with Stefan is lost, thanks, in part, to the troubles in Northern Ireland.
So Gina marries the strong and silent Warren, who is (like all the men she meets) "full of considerate energy". She settles for domesticity, unable to forget her first great passion as her child grows more and more to resemble his father.
As 20 years tick by, Gina's occasional returns to Ireland are fraught with fears of meeting Stefan, but they allow her to catch up with her happy Irish friends, the Brackens, and with the country's gradual transformation from its static received image to projection into the wider world .
Many articulate and unusually liberal conversations flow from the page. Northern Ireland is hardly mentioned and the conflicts in the ex-Yugoslavian states grow increasingly brutal.
Details of such horrors, seen through the eyes of a Serbian boy soldier, come sandwiched between scenes of Gina's personal difficulties and Tom's developing interest in his Eastern European roots. The centre cannot hold. Gina's health fails, Stefan is found, old lies about his true origins are explained, Tom heads off to help the Bosnian cause and the boy soldier goes ballistic.
Described thus, Banks of Green Willow may sound like a typical airport blockbuster. As a narrative it could be read as such, though with a mere 275 pages it's a lot slimmer than the usual doorstops of that genre. But anyone familiar with Kevin Myers's journalism will know that the sheer exuberance of his style conceals something much more weighty, a deeper search for meaning in the ordinary stuff of human experience.
This novel works in a similar way. Musing about her past, Gina decides that lives are "assembled from the imperfections of half-recalled truths, mangled in the remembering"; knee-deep in gore, the Serbian boy begins to feel envy for those he kills; and on their last journey together, which ends in a Co Wicklow graveyard, the contradictions of the histories they find there remind Gina and Stefan of the dangerous assumptions which link blood with belonging.
Towards its end, the easy sentiment of the story threatens to blunt the sharp edges of its message. With fiction comes the danger of being carried away by one's own romancing. Yet always, as a journalist who has seen the cruelties of war and death first hand, Kevin Myers knows how to puncture mawkishness with fact.
For the reader, such rude awakenings from escapism to harsh reality can feel jolting. But it is the balance of those extremes which help make this novel both compulsive and hauntingly relevant to the gathering conflicts elsewhere.
Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic