Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?

‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered literature or travelled to another continent.’ Magic mushrooms in Dublin, opioids in Thailand and San Francisco, hallucinogenic cactus in Bolivia and Peru, ketamine in India… he encounters terror, near-death and ecstasy by every means available, including MDMA — Ecstasy itself. This is no glimpse through the doors of perception; it’s free-fall down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Or hell, depending on how the trip goes.

Rob Doyle’s first novel, Here are the Young Men, was a savage picture of a bunch of Dublin losers on their school-leaving summer: a bildungsroman with booze, drugs and murder on the agenda. Critical praise and award nominations followed. Now comes Threshold. Memoir? Travelogue? Auto-fiction? Doyle says it’s a novel.

In self-contained chapters the book follows the peregrinations of the narrator, ‘Rob’, who at 16 realised ‘work, as it was generally experienced by people of my working-class background… was to be avoided’.