Reflections in a Tar-barrel

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Does every human being think the body he or she inhabits is ugly? - The hero of this novel, nick-named Lofty, thinks the Creator has dealt him a poor hand, physically and intellectually, and embarks on a campaign to thwart the designs of this same Creator. His campaign sees him combine the roles of hawker in religious goods and keeper of a mobile brothel. Because of his eccentric manner, people consider him a half-wit. And his school experiences persuade him that this estimate is true. Yet, in a tragi-comic way, his untutored mind grapples with the gigantic themes, the nature of God and creation, death and reincarnation, Einsteinian time, and he arrives at his own world-view, his own mystical insights. Set in the mid-seventies, this novel explores the world through the eyes of this eccentric young man, from the West of Ireland to Paris and Lourdes. The relationship he strikes up with a prostitute on the streets of Paris leads back to the woman-starved West of Ireland and into a sequence of events which hurtle towards disaster.