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Clocking in at just under 500 pages, The Abode of Fancy weaves together a number of distinct narratives, including but not limited to: a disaffected Dublin student full of unrequited love, an antique book dealer living in self-imposed squalor, an American poet experimenting with various sorts of exile and a mystical Monk on a journey with animal companions. Coll’s range of styles include the meta-fictional, the satirically realist and the mythic. Cadences from Joyce, Sterne and Flann O’Brien are heavily embedded in the style. For the scale of what he has taken on, Coll deserves respect. However, there are significant issues in the text that may give the reader cause for hesitation. First among them the sketch of gender relations the book lays out. One such choice passage recalls Ivana, a “busty Slavic peach with a sultry gaze and taste for flagellation, a ready ride, a great bundle of fun and a barrel of laughs — she did ditch him, in favour of a money man she married[…]”.

Irish literature has produced some juicy content in the past, and one or two lecherous characters does not a bad novel make. But the reader will likely notice that all the characters — all of them men — think like this. A fixation on the physically and visually erotic, and the twin assumption that touching someone’s genitals in the right way at the right time is where love begins and ends, permeates into the authorial voice. The reader who decides it is worth sticking around for the richly magpied references and linguistic fireworks of the kind that Coll sometimes achieves will have to get used to this less interesting stuff. Nor is there an obvious answer to the question of where Coll’s craftsmanship ends and his purple prose begins; the real gems of metaphor and lists reeled off with a sense of whimsey are buried under clunking ones like: “[…]him it was who Sakuro loved, he with whom, in the impoverished idiom of the age, it was she ‘went out’ with. This concept, of ‘going out’ with someone, was a foreign one to Simeon[…]”

Despite its significant shortcomings, Coll’s work is lovingly produced by Lilliput Press, with a splendid cover design.