For the latter crime, the consequent and climactic court trial involving an implicated but innocent Ollie fuels his sense of shame and incipient insanity, and impels his flight to refuge and reflection. "You have to break out before you learn the laws of the tribe," notes an emotionally battered Ollie. "And you have to break inside before you can learn your true nature."

The kind of haunted introspection and recrimination that is central to Sudden Times, recalls the insight of writer Edna O'Brien in her 1976 history Mother Ireland, in which she states that "a whole entourage of ghosts resides in [the Irish], ghosts with whom the inner rapport is as frequent, as perplexing, as defiant as with any of the living." With this kind of inner conflict surging through the deteriorating mind of a proud "Sligo man" like Ollie, who most mornings wakes up "with a start wondering what had happened. ...Then went to bed the next night wondering what would," the rapport with ghosts becomes more than contentious. Disorientation and full-on paranoia take over, disrupting daily routine and threatening his well-being. "The truth folk are following me about the town," Ollie believes at one point.

More ominously but arguably, he insists that someone has drugged him, and that another is stalking him and trying to kill him. Protecting himself with just-because-you're-paranoid tactics meant to foil those he's certain are out to get him, Ollie "spotted this buck on the top of a high building with a gun. So I sprinted across the road, shouting and shouting," finally "breaking into a stranger's home to escape."

The frenetic, abrupt and sometimes happenstance nature of events real or imagined bears out the permeating notions in Sudden Times: that, indeed, "most things in life happen...suddenly," and that "you and me are programmed to be random." As Ollie maintains at another moment, "Sometimes you are a beat ahead of the possibilities, things go wrong, and serendipity does not show its face."

Healy conveys this sense of resignation and trepidation with a seesawing, ricocheting style that reflects Ollie's disordered mind. In contrast to Healy's more densely-packed and more traditionally-told novels, Fighting with Shadows and Goat Song, the stark Sudden Times sees time and place leapfrog back and forth, while the narrative — set to erratic, jarring and unexpected rhythms — is scattershot with fragmented flashbacks, hallucinatory sequences and comforting dreams, in which Ollie "walked all point of the compass."