"I want to change the definition of Irishness and the definition of the novel, " he tells Padraig Kenny

WHEN Julian Gough was fronting indie band Toasted Heretic in the early '90s, he was renowned for using a mirror as a prop. It might have seemed like his narcissistic equivalent of Morrissey's bunch of flowers but Gough was demonstrating a gift for irony which has reached its pinnacle in his latest novel Jude: Level 1. The book is about 18-yearold orphan Jude's hapless odyssey across an increasingly bizarre Ireland . . . during which he manages to fall in love with a girl working in Supermacs, temporarily become a freemason/hunchback and accidentally impersonate Stephen Hawking. It combines the stylistic and spiritual influences of Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Charles Dickens and The Simpsons. But ultimately it's all Julian Gough and the result could be the finest comic novel since Flann O' Brien's The Third Policeman.

When I speak to Gough about the potential reaction to Jude and his upcoming appearance at the Galway Arts Festival, he is as far from the seeming narcissist as one would expect. Selfeffacing yet confident, polite yet subversive, Gough is genuinely excited about the reception his laugh-out-loud tour de force will receive. I remind him about his recent appearance on The Late Late Show in which he talked about the kind of fictional world Jude inhabits, a world where clergymen sue children for allowing them to take sexual advantage of them. "I don't think they necessarily got the joke. It was an older audience and I think a lot of them were there for the discussion about the book on the Pope, so they probably weren't really mentally ready for the kind of book I was talking about, " he laughs. "I met some of them afterwards and they were very friendly and nice but I think they were caught on the wrong foot with that one."

Regarding the novel, he says he expects to be "kicked around the room for it" and has his metaphorical flak jacket at the ready. And while he has a genuinely mischievous and seditious streak, he is circumspect enough to know the difference between offending people just for the sake of it and making them think. Gough is also a literary critic of considerable prowess and has written an incisive essay about the novel as an art-form. Talk about this leads him to his own literary vocation.

"I actually want to change the definition of the canon, the definition of Irishness and the definition of the novel." For him the biggest threat to the novel is its acceptance as a serious art form and the misguided attempts by universities to teach novel writing. "Because if it starts to take itself too seriously it's f***ed. It has to stay loose, because the novel is a very rebellious form. It's a shitstirring form."

Gough's wish to change the novel as we know it is delivered without haughtiness and pomposity and is as reasonable and quietly earnest as his genuine passion for the power of literature. "It's novels that people tend to burn in the streets, it's the Salman Rushdies that get their books burned, the John McGaherns that get fired from their teaching jobs, the James Joyces that get driven into exile.

Novels should be dangerous and should be argued about and should cause fights in pubs.

They're only doing their job if they do do that and if they are stirring it up a bit. If they're accepted and they're considered safe or cosy and they get great reviews from Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times and they're thoroughly approved of then there's something wrong with them."

Such sentiments of course will put him firmly in the firing line of the critics, but as he says "I'm up for a fight on this one." He's also prepared for the inevitable critical prejudice against Jude because of its comic nature. "It's a problem I think when you do comedy, that people disregard the serious ideas that you're smuggling in there." Jude itself is crammed with hilarious potshots at Celtic Tiger Ireland, political and religious hypocrisy, and the national obsession with property. "I think there is a snobbery in literature and I'm against it, so I have to pay the price for trying to reach a lot of readers and for trying to get heavy ideas across disguised as light ideas. I'll accept that. You can't have everything."

Having said that, you sense the confidence he has in his abilities.

Like any true satirist his work is subtle and non-hectoring, and the novel reads with an ease that belies its hard-won creation. He talks about the sheer graft of going over a single scene fifty times "where you've just gone over it again and again, and taken things out and put them back in again and polished them, " precisely the kind of dedication that makes Jude Level 1 seem so effortless, and which won him the largest short story prize in the world for its prologue. "It was such a relief to win the prize, because it justified what I was doing." What he was doing was living the kind of artistic life in Galway, which he admits is becoming even harder in the current economic climate.

Eventually this led to the lowpoint of being evicted from his house, and doubts about where he was going professionally.

Then there was the added problem of Jude itself , as he says "I was going through a very worrying period there where I was thinking 'Jesus Christ, what have I written?'" It was preying on my mind, because it was really hard to find a publisher for such a strange kind of book. And I was thinking a lot about The Third Policeman and what a brilliant book it was and how influential it is, and yet it couldn't find a publisher at the time." But again, instead of the usual tablethumping vindication of some writers, he stresses the relief when Jude found a home. It's the kind of modest reaction that makes Gough himself so endearing, and his grand scheme for literature so palatable, as he talks about the literary world as an "airless bubble I would like to pop" and "steering the novel into the discomfort zone where the interesting things happen."

I put it to him that there's an almost punk sensibility to his attempts to turn the novel on its head. He warms to the idea. "I'd love to do to the literary novel what punk did to the prog rock album. I do think that some of the things that win the Booker prize, and are therefore supposed to be the best literary novel of the year are just f**king boring. They're the equivalent of a big long selfindulgent guitar solo followed by a drum solo. They're all about the writer showing off his chops, and have nothing to do with entertaining the reader and making the world fresh again."

He lives in Berlin now, but visits Ireland occasionally and he comments on the exasperated affection he feels for the country and what it has become. He remembers moving from London to Nenagh when he was seven: "In some ways it was great, and in some ways it was terrible." In hindsight it was hard moving from a multicultural city to a monocultural rural area, but he acknowledges its importance in making him who he is today. He talks about being poor and how he doesn't mind it, but what he does mind is the idea of giving his time over to a job he hates.

Instead Gough has ploughed his own furrow, writing novels and pop songs for ten years while on the dole in Galway. You get the feeling that he's a man born out of time, someone who would have thrived in an artist's garret in old Bohemian Paris.

Then inevitably it's back to his unflagging adoration of the novel.

"There's a kind of ecstatic communion you can get in a book sometimes, where you're nearly jumping up and down on your feet and you're excited and you didn't expect this next thing to happen. . . And I want to create that kind of ecstatic communion.

Rather than having the reader sit back in their seat and say 'well that was a very original simile.

What exquisite use of the semicolon.' I couldn't give a f**k about that, " he laughs. "I want to show the reader a really good time. I want the reader down front in the mosh pit."

Julian Gough will be reading from 'Jude Level 1' as part of the Galway Arts Festival on 24 July at the Radisson SAS Hotel

Picks from the Galway Arts Festival

MARK THOMAS 19 July, Radisson SAS Hotel

Political activist and comedian Mark Thomas is bringing his stand-up show to Galway for the first time this year. Thomas is a rather atypical stand up, as he puts it "It's slightly hard to describe it really. What usually happens is I go off and do stuff and then come back and tell people the stories and it's funny. The first part of this show is about the British government's attempts to limit demonstrators and rights to freedom of speech. The second part is about going after arms dealers, and the absurdity of laws, and how you can play with those laws."

As serious as his intent has been over the course of his career, Thomas is adamant about the fun element of a job which has seen him interview publicity hungry George Galloway on his toilet, an attempt to export a tank disguised as an ice cream van to Iraq, and trying to get a group of Colombian diplomats together to rob the Peckham Halifax to demonstrate the advantages of diplomatic immunity. "It doesn't work without the fun, it just doesn't work. Demonstrating, campaigning and protesting, and trying to bring about change should be fun . . . if it's just worthy breast-beating shit I'm not interested." Thomas also emphasises the real political benefits of what he does. "You want to show people the possibilities that you can win and change things. That you're going to have fun with all of this, and that it's incredibly liberating to do this kind of thing, especially when you've just organised hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations and the police have to comply with it."

I ask him for advice on how he would deal with our own Teflon Taoiseach, and he laughs. "He's a politician! He's slippery by nature. It's like wrestling eels. That's what I do for a living, I wrestle with eels."

'SAU'RUS' . . . CLOSE ACT 20. . . 21 July

The Galway Arts Festival is never complete without a bit of grandiose street theatre, and this year Macnas has a rival in the shape of Dutch company Close Act's 'Sau'rus' show. A huge undertaking that involves resurrected prehistoric monsters roaming the streets of Galway. Should be fun for kids and big kids alike.

'MUSIC FOR MINORITIES' . . .MICHAEL ROUSE 21 - 22 July, Radisson SAS Hotel

New York-based composer, guitarist and singer Mikel Rouse presents a show which involves what he calls "Romantic channel surfing". Combining guitar-based blues songs with filmed interviews of people in Louisiana and New York City in order to counterpoint, complement and hopefully illuminate music, stories and people into a seamless whole.

'THE SUNSET LIMITED' . . .STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY 16 - 21 July, Town Hall Theatre

Steppenwolf, the Land of the Free's most celebrated independent theatre company brings Cormac McCarthy's 'The Sunset Limited' to the Townhall Theatre. It's a twohander with actors Freeman Coffey and Austin Pendleton, revolving around the debate about life, death and truth, between a suicidal atheist and a good samaritan ex-con. Anything by the company that gave the world the likes of Gary Sinise, John Malkovich and Joan Allen is always worth a look.