Fiction

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Maribou Stork Nightmares

By Irvine Welsh. W.W. Norton. 264 pages. $21.00

Fantasies and dream-states have been literary staples from the days of Gilgamesh to the twentieth century hallucinations of Huxley, Castaneda and Burroughs. In his intermittently dazzling new novel, Irvine Welsh, the young Scottish-born author of last year's highly-praised "The Acid House," introduces yet another wild, almost shamanistic state of consciousness: the coma.

"Maribou Stork Nightmares" unspools the tale of a club-hopping soccer thug from a very unlikely vantage point: its hero's unconsciousness. Roy Strang, a failed suicide, can hear everything going on around him in his hospital room as he recounts his ghastly upbringing in the grim council estates of suburban Edinburgh. He intersperses these memories with a lucid nightmare about an imaginary hunting expedition in Africa to catch a monstrous predator, the Maribou Stork. "The world we live in is not run by cuddly, strong bears, graceful sleek cats or loyal friendly dogs," Welsh writes about these odd beasts. "Maribou Stork run this place, and they are known to be nasty bastards. Yes, even the vulture does not get such a bad local press."

As the novel's multiple layers of reality develop, they come to feel almost like multimedia: Strang's reminiscences -- often wrenching in their emotional complexity -- and his allegorical nightmares are occasionally interspersed with the voices of nurses, doctors and family members as they try to talk him back to consciousness. It's a device that works well, offsetting some of the novel's more predictable elements: the ferociously gritty depiction of working-class life in Thatcher's England, and a surprisingly politically correct feminist denouement. When all of its realities come into play, however, Welsh's "Maribou Stork Nightmares" attains an eye-opening synergy, casting an idiosyncratic light on the surreal states in between life and death.

--Scott Baldinger

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