Comedy, tragedy and a road trip all rolled into a pacey, if sometimes schlocky, debut

Christopher Hitchens once said that it was literature, not gospels, where real ethical dilemmas are met and dealt with. Such a truism springs to mind often in this flexible and pacey debut from Irish-born New Yorker Dan Sheehan (inset) that uses the road trip and the coarse textures of humour to pull a troubled soul out of a Sarajevo nightmare partly his own making.

Karl, Baz and Tom have been knocking around together since their teenage years but now, in their mid-20s, they’re being forced to look at life in a more serious light. Tom has spent the last four years in Sarajevo, lured there by the “siren’s call” of foreign gunfire.

The man Karl (our narrator for most of the time) and Baz encounter at the airport is not the same person, and the scars of major psychological trauma are immediately, shockingly evident to the pair of them.

They decide that they will escort Tom on a road trip to Restless Souls, a therapeutic facility in sunny California that special- ises in treating PTSD. The backand-forth banter of Karl and Baz, often stirred up through exasperation and inadequacy around Tom’s stupor, is full of rhythm and zing.

When the humour hits its target, it is charming and pronounced. When it doesn’t, it is sub-Roddy Doyle.

Pages turn without effort under Sheehan’s watch, something that will stand to him wherever he decides to go from here. The third act, as the trio negotiate the rehab facility of the title, gets a little schlocky in places, with unnecessary hokum about experimental psycho-pharmacological research and unorthodox methods.

The whole passage of the narrative is cartoonish and sits awkwardly between chilling anecdotes of brutal, factually based horrors perpetrated on innocents in Sarajevo. Dr Saunders’ facility is the geographic destination for the three men, but it is definitely the journey aspect of Sheehan’s novel, less constrained by convention, that provides the story with a more sturdy foundation.

Just when the California chapters threaten to round things off on a bit of a bum note, Sheehan gets back to the essence of his tale with a conclusion that erupts with heart and humanity as it examines an ethical question.

It is evidence that he certainly has a sensitive ear for those elusive registers of the soul.