mushroom.man, by Paolo Tullio Lilliput Press, 220pp, £7.99

Why are magic mushrooms like the Internet? Paolo Tullio explores the unlikely equivalence in what has been billed as "Ireland's first Internet novel". It could just as easily be called "Ireland's first mushroom novel", as it's the fungi who take centre stage.

The eponymous anti-hero inhabits a dank, mouldy world, deep in the Wicklow woods, a world conducive to mushroom cultivation and philosophical musings. He tells us his story in a series of autobiographical emails, sent to an inquisitive, and equally reclusive, behavioural psychologist in Iowa (known by his email name of mushroom.seeker).

The book begins splendidly with a captivating account of mushroom.man's obsessive and skilled hunting of his beloved hallucinogenic mushrooms: "You have to get into its skin, react like it, you have to know its likes and dislikes, where it feeds, where it lives. The odd thing is that to catch it you must also love it."

Prompted by the interest of his academic correspondent, we learn more in succeeding emails about mushroom.man's flight from the everyday world of responsibility, suburbia and (especially) the telly. He depicts the constant struggle with his thatched roof, plagues of live and dead rats, and the everpresent Irish dampness. It's no surprise when his long-suffering girlfriend departs, to marry an advertising executive by way of contrast, leaving our hero to his solitude and his mushrooms. These early chapters are written with economy and imagination, drawing the reader into a primitive, rural world; they explain how mushroom.man, influenced by his much-loved best friend Greg, developed his ideas, in particular his fondness for trips or, if you prefer, drug-induced states of consciousness.

mushroom.man could be dismissed as an incorrigible old hippy, but Tullio, in the book's pivotal chapter half-way through, likens the mushroom magic not alone to ancient druidic ritual but also to the modern world of the Net. mushroom.man wants to experience "the universe of the sorcerer - the shaman world", but sees the Internet as going in the same direction, bringing us all together in some shared virtual reality, with computer programmes instead of magic mushrooms as the unpredictable external modifiers of our sensory perceptions.

In the same chapter Tullio, as mushroom.man, enthusiastically describes Mandelbrot's organic, repetitive fractal geometry and speculates whether machine intelligence could evolve organically like fractal images and make a computer addict's virtual reality as strange as that of a mushroomnibbling mystic.

These outre ideas are never challenged by mushroom.seeker. The Iowa-based scholar is never developed as a character: he merely uses mushroom.man's outpourings as fodder for a self-serving academic paper and has no opinions, let alone passions, of his own. mushroom.man meanders on, consumes his mushrooms, contends with shady neighbours and experiences perpetual sexual frustration; surely there will be an explosion in the manner of bleak modern Irish writing (McCabe's The Dead School, McGinley's Bogmail)? The book ends, though, with a whimper not a bang, so much so that a sequel must be a not unwelcome possibility.

An email novel is a daring and imaginative idea: the communication between the novel's two voices, based on email messages, is described by mushroom.seeker as like "a game of postal chess". But mushroom.man largely ignores his correspondent's messages and simply tells his own story; Tullio loses the potential contrast and tension of his chosen structure. At the end of the book, we're still not certain who mushroom.man really is and whether we should take his narrative with a few grains of fly agaric. It's nonetheless a very entertaining book, beautifully produced by Lilliput with an elegant and informative mushroom sketch preceding each chapter.

Tom Moriarty is an Irish Times staff journalist