BOOK REVIEW / Paranormal bones to pick: A second life by Dermot Bolger, Viking pounds 15

IT'S always encouraging to read about out-of- body experiencs where the almost-departed waft round the emergency-room ceiling, greeting their deceased loved ones, reluctant to return to the medical panic below because it's just so great being dead. This is what happens to Dermot Bolger's protagonist, Sean Blake, after a road accident; but he then effects corporeal re-entry, bringing several bones to pick.

Since the age of 11 Sean has known that he was adopted, but he has never made much fuss about it until now. Amazingly, he has never even told his wife, Geraldine, who finds him distressingly altered since his accident, either eerily distracted with her and their very young children or out on some quest he won't explain. To give him credit, he's in the dark about this quest himself.

In the bad old 1950s in rural Ireland, an unmarried mother was an unmentionable family disgrace who was smuggled away to a Catholic institution where nuns would humiliate the young woman into giving up her baby for adoption. So it was with Sean's mother Lizzie, who has been grieving for him, despite a husband and three daughters in England, ever since. At first, in alternating narrations, Sean and his mother pine with increasing telepathic urgency to make contact with each other. But Sean has much official red tape to untangle, the nuns having routinely falsified birth certificates, confounded initiative and cluttered the road of the sinner.

Sean is further waylaid by ancestral hauntings reaching back to a 19th-century cholera epidemic, by second sight at various landmarks and gravesides and by prophetic dreams. He seems extraordinarily fortunate to find a kindly widower with nothing better to do than chase up his psychic hunches in the crumbling yellow pages of the local archives. But is Sean grateful? No, he is too busy seething at injustice, poverty and the nuns.

While the storytelling is satisfyingly energetic and the thematic texturing skilfully crafted, there are strong elements of melodrama here, and the main issue - how drastically 40 years have changed Irish attitudes towards single motherhood - is driven home with a sledgehammer.

Sean is so angry when he learns that Lizzie's death has cheated him of the dreamt-of reunion by just a few months, he embarrasses the aunt who brings him the news by dragging her into a strip joint. He careers across Ireland in search of the nun who once bullied his mother into signing him away, and finds the uncle priest who failed to protect Lizzie from the family wrath. But by this time, of course, the nun is blissfully senile and the priest has dealt himself far more penance than Sean could have devised. So Sean is left shaking his fist at the past, and is only at last persuaded to turn round and embrace the future, that sparky wife, baby daughter and the toddling son who has some of the book's best dialogue.

That these twists of plot and their historical echoes are channelled through the character's 'special powers' seems highly artificial. Such paranormal sleuthing is a vague affair, which even obsessive Sean abandons, and which never quite delivers the frisson that Bolger's well-earthed, well-calculated emotional finale has in store.