Except for some relatively sustained and straightforward exposition-rich chapters later in the book — much needed as cappers to twice-told telltale signs, foreshadowing and allusions — the raw nerve, immediacy and controlled tension of Sudden Times is complemented with doses of humor and tenderness, plainspoken and poetic, sometimes told in language and wordplay evocative of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Thus, a free-flowing stream such as "... we take off over bumps birdlike scatters thunder past the cemetery John Pete lifts his cap and blesses himself with the peak I salute a hare darts across the road Good morning hare," may be followed a few pages later, in another kind of tip of the cap and salute, with an absurd bit of wheel-spinning, grotesquely comic but philosophic dialogue.

But in the end, the wistfulness and whimsicality of Sudden Times, just like the darker themes involving murder and madness, signifies altogether the author's touch. A particularly amusing event, distinctly Healy, takes place upon Ollie's reunion with his once-reproachful father during a trip back to England. In surreal, kaleidoscopic, alcohol-fueled town-painting revelry, Ollie and his dad, accompanied by an amassing group of celebrants, go looking for a particular man, a fiddler, who may not even exist.

"It was the sort of thing my father would do," a bemused Ollie declares, "go searching for a man he couldn't find."

More poignant, heartbreaking moments come when a self-aware Ollie struggles to break through the haze of mental illness to "put myself where I once was." At one point, in what should be familiar surroundings, he catches "a glimpse of a vague place I once was daily." But he finds that "the vagueness hurts. It has no name. I try the streets and the smells that lead there, but they taper off. It's funny. I thought it was all stored someplace nice."

At other times, more hopeful ones, Ollie's attempts to reconnect with the people and places in his life, and with his own memories and real emotions, show a glimmer of success. He remembers watching passing trains in the night, wondering about the passengers: "I used to watch them sometimes, sitting in their carriages, looking at nothing, reading, as they careered through the night. Commuters framed in the windows, like sorrowful portraits. ... Longing came over me. I cherish longing."

That's no small feat for Ollie, and for Healy. The effort to overcome crushing guilt, and to recapture a rich life and a true self comprises the hallmark and the main accomplishment of Sudden Times. As Ollie puts it, "the actual event will bring its own shame. But it's when you run it through your brain, again and again, down the years, that it grows enormous. ...The afterlife of sin is more horrendous than the sin itself." The achievement of Healy here is not so much in tracing the sin and its aftermath, as it is in examining the "sinner" with subtlety and humanity.