Drift by James Hanley (1930)

This is at once an amazing and a confounding book. Its picture of a young Catholic man and his fight with ideas of God, religion and duty both inherited and wished for is at its best astonishing. The visceral depth of the portrait rolls in poetic pulses through a landscape of the mind beautifully captured. This internal struggle is set within a richly rounded external scene, made up of the lilts and customs of the Irish in Liverpool in the 1920s; the hypocritical deceits and religious time-serving, the hints of sensuality under the iron hand of uprightness, the emotional pull of surviving on nothing, as well as physical hunger and want. Joe Rourke is part of all of this, and yet yearning for more in what seems an alternatingly knowing and then ignorant way. There are also, though, disturbances of this strong mixture; times when it seems Hanley has become almost unhinged - he'll drift off into a peculiar meditation on some seemingly unimportant or odd issue, or surprise the reader with a reference which is deranged or, if not, at least utterly disconnected. I don't think that these are fully intentional, but rather the effluvia of a notion that this needed to be written at high heat and left to roll its own course. A self-indulgence (which occurs a little too often) I'm tempted to forgive as the results are otherwise brilliant.