Gaff Topsails: 1

A 500-year-old Irish Catholic village on the Newfoundland coast comes to life in this assured debut, set in the years after WWII. Michael Barron, a young mute, is awakening to adulthood as he explores an enormous iceberg with his friends, still half in thrall to his father's stories of a beautiful woman who rides the ice, part Blessed Virgin Mary, part Coleridgean ghost. Although Michael is the novel's only mute, his silent isolation is common to nearly all Kavanagh's characters: Johnny the Light, an old, crippled hero, is a haunted, often delirious drunk; Father MacMurrough, new to the parish, has spent most of his adulthood in Asia avoiding village life and its unhappy associations; restless, teenage Mary loathes her mother and pursues a future husband through secret pagan rituals. This is nothing new. The village's founding father, Tomas Croft, was even more isolated, the son of an Irish monk who stole away from his English companions to land in Newfoundland in solitude. Shifting its focus from character to character, Kavanagh's sometimes ponderous narrative treats each individual story as a complete piece for the reader to assemble with the others. The abundance of period detail and unmistakable shadow of Joyce (whom Kavanagh claims to have helped translate into Mandarin) cast an occasional pall, but there is no mistaking the talent and vivid imagination at work throughout the novel. (Apr.)