Falling Out of Time

``On one level I am the artificer of everything that has occurred but on another I'm not,'' says Melling's central character and narrator, a Canadian author who has fled a failed marriage to take refuge in an artist's retreat in Ireland. As we follow Raffie, the subject of her novel-in-progress and manifestly her alter-ego, in and out of fantasies and myths peopled with gods and heroes, into the gritty reality of drug-fueled sex in contemporary Ireland, we get glimpses of the aforesaid turbulent marriage, now displaced by even more turbulent sex. Raffie, a philosophy student in Dublin; Michael, a younger, aspiring heavy metal musician; Gabriel, his darkly sinister manager, are the three players who in some way provide the storyteller's catharsis. This quirky, evanescent novel with passages of hallucinatory power and a strange, three-tier love story, ends in apt ambiguity. The Irish-born Melling, who lives in Canada, has written books for young readers; this is her first novel for adults. (Sept.)