Ciaran Carson latest and most extraordinary prose work is a fusion of three narrative strands: ribald tellings of tales from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', in which characters are transformed into plants or water or stone; dark and disturbing Irish fairy stories, in which characters are abducted and menaced, and sometimes rewarded for their ability to tell stories to demonic listeners; and fantastic tales of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, of the painters and their time and of the pictures themselves.
The universal theme is that of transmutation and the power of art: of light captured on canvas, experience immortalised in narrative. Stories branch infinitely into other stories, each connecting, each fishing for the truth. The central image of amber, of light or creatures captured in it, transformed by it, sustained throughout the book. Carson's tales are full of calm, deadpan, cruel humour and astonishing physical description, and the evocation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age is a "tour de force".
'Fishing for Amber' may be compared with the work of Flann O'Brien, of Rabelais, of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, but ultimately it transforms all its influences. It is a brilliant, indefinable contribution to modern Irish writing.
