The History of Things Sean Moncrieff New Island, 14.95, 222pps Miguel Delaney

ANYONE who watched Don't Feed The Gondolas in its heyday must be wondering when exactly Sean Moncrieff lost that dark sense of mischief that used to accompany his every utterance.

As his broadcasting career has gone more mainstream, the measured, piercing wit that perfectly helmed that show has been replaced by a hyperactive yet neutered demeanour. The answer, however, seems to be found in his second novel, The History of Things. Whatever dark comic leanings he has sacrificed for operating before the watershed have seemingly been poured into his writing. And, mercifully, that is just one of this book's many qualities.

Dealing with much the same themes as his patchy first novel Dublin, Moncrieff this time tackles them in a much more understated manner, yet achieves far more. Whereas that was an ambitious crime thriller incorporating the capital's burgeoning cocaine culture and the Russian mafia, The History of Things is much smaller in scale . . . and the result is that Moncrieff 's writing is really allowed to breathe.

The story centres on Tomas Dalton's return home to Dublin.

A film director who lived in London, he has agreed to take on a project in Ireland to overcome a painful divorce, believing the city of his childhood would provide some manner of therapy.

However, all it does is increase his worries as he has to deal with the unwanted affections of a fading Hollywood star and ongoing attacks on his home and treasured antique possessions . . . the 'things' of the title . . . from a local gang of children. A seemingly simple story, but the reader is soon hanging on it.

Starting chapters in the middle of an event or conversation . . . all written from Tomas's point of view . . . Moncrieff dripfeeds information and in the process slowly unravels a surprisingly layered and mature narrative. This ability to pique interest and hold it is ably assisted by his clipped, concise sentences which subtly switch between genuinely hilarious riffs and seemingly throwaway lines that only add depth. Moncrieff often leaves both jokes and key events to hang in the air and enhance the emotion.

As Tomas's situation only worsens, the story edges towards an ending that is at once preposterous and poignant. It feels a perfect fit for this book however and the important point is that Moncrieff will have truly made you care enough to stay there until then.

Hard to dig this grave affair

The Gravedigger's Daughter Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, 27.45 Helen Rock SINCE she started writing stories on an old typewriter her grandmother gave her when she was 14 years old in 1952, American author Joyce Carol Oates has barely paused between books; indeed they often overlap and I wouldn't be surprised to learn this Princeton professor of humanities keeps several on the boil at once, so breathless is the pace of her incantatory prose.

To date, the woman credited with "slugging it out with Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe for the title of "Great American Novelist" has likely outwritten all of the great Victorian novelists with 35 full-length novels, eight novellas, 11 novels for teens (using a pseudonym), many short stories, poems and countless essays and lively reviews for, among others, the New York Review of Books and New Yorker magazine. To put that in some kind of literary context, the famously prolific Scott wrote 33 novels, Trollope 28, Dickens only 18 and Thackeray 13.

Rural poverty, sexual abuse, class and racial tensions, the desire for power and for love, and scenes of extreme violence are a constant in Oates's fiction. The Gravedigger's Daughter is no exception. Our heroine Rebecca's tale is bleak and repetitive. Born to civilised German-Jewish Fiction parents on a filthy immigrant ship as it docked in New York harbour just before the outbreak of the second world war, Rebecca Schwart is raised poor in rural New York with her father Jacob (a former Maths teacher and the gravedigger of the title), her mother Anna (an accomplished pianist) and her two brothers.

For no good reason, they all . . . except Rebecca . . . evolve into ugly, troll-like creatures who, quite frankly, are unbelievable. Even dark-eyed Anna only comes to life once, when secretly listening to Julian Schnabel playing Beethoven's 'Appassionata' on her husband's radio, which is forbidden to her. But then she becomes a slatternly, inchoate troll again.

Poverty and racial slurs aside, there is not enough reason for Jacob, in particular, an educated man who once was noble and brave, taught the poor and sang arias with his beloved wife at the piano in the 'old country', to descend into a subhuman violent monster, whose boots had to be cut out of the flesh of his hoof-like feet, after he killed Anna and then himself (but missed 13-year-old Rebecca) with a shotgun in the bedroom of their little stone house.

After that, Rebecca is on her own and nearly everybody she comes across is vile, not least her polygamous "husband", who finally beats her so badly, and then her toddling son, that she flees and changes their names.

After that, she works at a series of menial jobs but then meets a disaffected jazz musician who comes from an immensely rich family and takes care of her and the boy, who becomes an international piano star. The book tails off . . . with a bit of a twist . . . in 1999 and ends with a question mark.

This is an exhausting book, and not just because it's 600 pages long when half that would have served the same purpose. The impression is that it was written almost in shorthand, breathlessly, and moves the poor reader backwards and forwards through the action, going over and over the same territory and using lots of italics and exclamation marks to make us notice something important! It's sadly lacking in humour and, in the happier later chapters, the few jokes Oates attempts alas fall flat. But it's printed on 100% recycled paper.

Everything but the sink

Ship of Dreams By Martina Devlin Poolbeg, 17.99.

Sarah McInerney

IT TAKES great skill to weave a novel around the sinking of the Titanic, and somehow manage to make it boring. Unfortunately, Martina Devlin succeeds in doing just this in her latest offering Ship of Dreams.

The idea for the plot is good: take one lifeboat full of survivors, all of whom hail from different social backgrounds and different financial circumstances, and track their lives in the United States after they are rescued from the icy ocean.

There's also an interesting adjunct to the story: one of Devlin's long-lost relatives, Tom O'Brien, was actually eloping on the Titanic with his pregnant girlfriend, intent on carving out a new life in the US. O'Brien drowned when the Titanic went down, but his girlfriend survived and bore his child.

He now has grandchildren dotted all over America.

When you combine this nugget of real-life drama with the decent storyline plan, you surely have all the ingredients for some rollicking action, passionate romance and even heartrending loss.

But no. For the most part, all of these are sadly absent from The Ship of Dreams. Crucially, Devlin chooses to begin her story one year after the ship sank. This is immediately disconcerting for any reader who thinks they're settling down to be immersed in one of the most interesting human disasters of the last century.

While Devlin returns to the Titanic early in the book, it is through memories and flashbacks.

The reader rarely actually gets onto the ship and effectively misses the crash, the sinking and any horror, bravery, stupidity or acts of love that went with it.

Worse, perhaps in her rush to make her characters believable, Devlin succeeds in making most of the lead personalities quite unlikeable . . . each with a flaw so obvious the reader struggles to care what they think, or what the future holds for them. Towards the end of the book, this improves. But by then, as for the ship itself, help has come too late.