Ar Gach Maoilinn Ta Siochain, by Padraig O Ciobhain, Coisceim, 226pp (no price given)

The back cover of this book sports a picture of the author intently building a stone wall. This is appropriate: O Ciobhain's latest novel is a slow book. Even the title, Ar Gach Maoilinn Ta Siochain ("On Every Hill There is Peace"), which is taken from a poem by Goethe, is ponderous. In picking up the book, we are dealing with an awkward thing, an ill-shaped rock, so to speak, which we endeavour to settle, nudge, cajole, into some sort of context.

I was perhaps fortunate in that I left the book down and only after a period of forgetfulness did I take it up again. I landed in the "Interlude", in the middle of a discussion of Heidegger's Dasein, followed by a remarkable description of Peig - the simple Blasket storyteller who, unintentionally became the terror of the urban classroom. Her existence is described as being that of a queen in the kingdom of her own hearth, scanning the fire as one would scan verses, with a sharp, bright eye.

This juxtaposition of German philosophy and the author's literary kinswoman brings the reader close to what I feel is the heart of the enterprise: the combining of the concept of "eiseadh" ("existence") with the making and developing of stories. Both the stories and the constant authorial philosophising which runs through them and around them concern themselves with such things as contingency, romantic love, generation, place. The discourse is carried on in a half-folkloric, half-contemporary world which, despite historical labelling here and there, is timeless: one generation follows another, making all periods the same.

It also makes all the characters the same, as the author/George/ Art readily admits. Take away the masks that the contingency of the tale has given and one character becomes indistinguishable from another - and from the author. So it is that, no matter who is speaking, the philosophising voice is always the same, even in its use of French words and Irish philosophical terms.

This becomes tedious at times. One must be careful here however. The author has a thing about reviewers. The aim of composition, he says, is just that - composition. And if that involves the proverbial Munster prolixity, then so be it. Why not accept the book as written?

This is exactly what we do. And with good reason O Ciobhain's language is supple and powerful, his descriptions well observed and evocative. Some of his thoughts are well worth hearing, and his tales well worth the telling, the best of them written with confidence and economy.

One of the problems, however, is that existentialism is only half a philosophy. While the Camus-like murder at the end of the book is well handled, it can only take us so far. The synthesis which the book adumbrates so well fails to happen, largely due to the inadequacy of the philosophy which, after clearing the ground, falls down on construction. This is not a condemnation. On the contrary, the very fact of this novel being there is, in itself, important.

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