JOHN Maher's first novel, The Luck Penny, vividly describes through charged language and historical erudition a cripplingly ravaged Ireland of 1849 that registers with the sentient heart while still reflecting our state today.

Set primarily in the isolated pastorate of Aghadoe in the "Queens County" of Laois, we're offered a superbly executed story about bereavement told through characters that intrigue from the first. Such breadth of personality is revealed through wellresearched description and internal dialogue that captures the times, these qualities inviting some to erroneously varnish Maher's fiction with the alluvial stain of Joyce.

At the outset, Dr John Drew . . .

the despairing, self-effacing academic C of I Minister . . . and Eliza his severe, and heartbroken wife, have the stalwart noblesse oblige, starched stiff determinism and emotional half-life to fail to come to terms with the death of their son Edward.

The two primary characters that bring about the tender mercy of healing are as different from husband and wife as can be imagined. John "Fox" Keegan, the dysfunctional republican romantic . . . a metaphor for the search of a largely personal if not anarchic freedom . . . and Aghadoe seamstress/healer/oracle Mrs Tours . . . a study in compassion, preternatural wisdom, ribald common sense and Irish Victorian mores . . . are a fascinating duo.

Further, Maher's authorial facility is less to do with the subJoycean than it is about emphasising his finely wrought and inclusive narrative. One may initially bridle at the phonetic setting down of colloquial words like "stookawn" and "bollox" but the flow of the syntax throughout involves and engrosses .

The title is a barbed expression of vindictively held classsuperiority on the part of Eliza Drew who calls to Pim's, a haberdashery in an execrable summertime Dublin, while on her way to a cholera-ridden yet emotionally magnetic London and comes across Fox Keegan. She has already drawn, through semiinstinctual and unerring prescience, cold-hearted and unfavourable conclusions about Keegan, her husband's one-time 'thinking secretary'.

But the 'bould Fox', in a defining rite-of-passage, demystifies John Drew while facilitating his deconstruction of the five-line Babylonian ideograph rubbing that the scholar obsesses with in order to keep at bay the moment of having to come to terms with Edward's death and accept the worst 'old blackness'.

Keegan is sympathetic to the abject inarticulacy of the Protestant Minister for he too has a son with severe disabilities living with the woman he loved, married and abandoned to the bosom of her family when his impatience with life forced him on his peripatetic, nomadic way.

Now the wage-slave must seek permission from his employer to attend his father's funeral at the place-of-resolution, Tullyroe, so 'amanuensis' and cryptographer cross from the 'Queens County' into republican Kilkenny.

There's a contemplative immediacy to The Luck Penny . . .

from the start you care about what happens to its central characters . . .

and its linguistic abundance has a wide appeal. Maher is a writer concerned with placing his story in a period in Ireland that reflects the ignorance and gombeenism of the past, but also its religious and political hopefulness.

The Lucky Penny is an outstanding Irish novel for the wider English-reading world because ultimately it's the exploration of the universality of death - and its sometime corollary of redemption. Maher is clearly a writer of sufficient gift to create a vision capable of emphasising such intention to his readership.

The author of the short story collection, The Coast of Malabar is surely destined to eclipse his already substantial reputation with this exceptionally realised novel.

Superb matter.