The Dust Collector
By Jennifer Lash
Harvester, 4.95 pounds

          Jennifer Lash has tried to fabricate a piece of standard issue anti-novel fitted out with all the usual features.  Her talent has hindered her.  Much of her new book, The Dust Collector, is made to conform to the nouveau roman blueprint.  There is a predictable stress on the arbitrary.  Contingency is neatly depicted.  Buts of precise physical description are meticulously set against life's random welter.  And at the centre of the book is a connoisseur of chaos.

              Rambling round an Irish city, Joseph Finn collects and itemises specimens of dust.  They are all "incredibly different" and pondering these powdery garnerings, the book preaches little sermons on the nature of particularity, denounces the bad faith that creates a dream of coherence called reality.  Misinterpretation, as is usual in these tracts of pointlessness, is an ever-present menace.  Picking up a little bit of fluff from a schoolgirl's cardigan, Joseph comes under suspicion of indecent assault.  Slipping on to a deserted tourist coach to gather further samples of detritus, he is apprehended as a thief, then committed to a mental home.

              Already over-familiar, the book's dry doctrines are reiterated with absurd persistence.  Fortunately, though, the narrative keeps escaping them.  Mrs. Lash is so gifted at evoking place and personality and weaving a compelling story that she really defeats her own intentions.  Constantly, the portentous lumber of the anti-novel gets shoved to one side as a plot takes interesting shape and fills with vividly depicted characters.  There are some excellent short stories in this anti-novel and a number of superb vignettes pinning down the distinctive character of Irish Catholicism.
 

                        -------------Peter Kemp