It’s nearly four years since I read Mary Costello’s first novel, Academy Street. It was a very striking and accomplished début and I recall thinking at the time how much I was looking forward to seeing how she would develop as a writer. Now comes The River Capture and more evidence of how skilled and sensitive a storyteller Costello is becoming.

The story is set in and around Ardboe House, a once grand but now faded home overlooking the fertile fields and ancient woods of County Waterford. Ardboe is the down-at-heel demesne of Luke O’Brien, an erstwhile schoolteacher taking a leave of absence from Belvedere College, the famous Jesuit school where James Joyce was once a pupil. Joyce is a continual presence and influence in Luke’s imagination; a hero, saint, and exemplar all at once.

Luke, living alone in the once-grand house, has memories instead of family, and literary heroes instead of friends. A solitary and lonely life that looks set to take root and become permanent is upended one day when a young woman knocks on the door …

The structure of the novel is peculiar. The first and longest section is a conventionally told story which then, for the final one hundred pages or so, shifts into a series of questions addressed to Luke (by the author? By Luke himself?). This move, itself a very Joycean conceit and reminiscent of parts of Ulysses, was a trick I found quite jarring and had the effect of distancing me from Luke’s emotional life, which itself had been so brilliantly rendered in the first half of the book. Deployed more briefly the change in style could have worked brilliantly, but the longer it was extended the more dissatisfying it became.

Leaving that to one side, I have a feeling this lyrical, sporadically brilliant, and flawed novel will stay in my mind for a long time.