Imagine an Irish Borges—constructing a Chinese puzzle of a text, describing his characters with Nabokovian relish and concocting a plot reminiscent of Dickens, H.G. Wells and The X-Files—and you'll have an idea what Carson's fourth book of prose is like. In lapidary sentences, this fiction proceeds jigsaw-like through 101 brief chapters, each titled for a color from Paris Green to Bible Black. (Cataloguing more shades than anyone might imagine, the table of contents alone is worth the price of the book.) Although the narrator is introduced in the novel's first lines, he reveals surprisingly little about himself, not even his first name. (His surname turns out to be Carson.) Instead, he tells us about Napoleon dying on St. Helena from the fumes of Paris Green and proceeds to discuss Jan van Eyck's double portrait of Arnolfini and his bride, a painting whose importance grows as the novel progresses. Wending his way through the lives of the saints, the lives of Lambert and Jan van Eyck, the lives of Wittgenstein, Conan Doyle and Wilde, Carson craftily unfolds his story about young Carson; his cousin, Berenice; his schoolmate Maeterlinck; and a mission they can fulfill only by sipping Shamrock Tea and slipping into the world of Jan van Eyck's double portrait. This meander through fact and fiction is not new to Carson, a prize-winning Belfast poet, who in past works has turned his peripatetic mind from Ovid's Metamorphoses
to Irish fairy tales to etymology and traditional Irish music. This mode clearly suits him, but because the disparate tales do not coalesce until late in this work, readers may lose patience, especially as the characters are "allowed no inner thoughts." But as a meditation on time and art, Carson's book sets its own benchmark. (Nov.)
