Few offstage images from Irish theatre are as indelible as Cuchulain crashing his sword against the waves at the conclusion of W B Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand. The 1903 play is a kind of riff on Sophocles, a reverse-Oedipal tragedy in which the hero of Irish mythology inadvertently slays his own son and, driven to madness, attacks the sea. Donal Ryan’s latest novel, which takes its title and epigraph from the closing lines of Yeats’s play, is similarly invested in this model of fate. A work of modern tragedy, it is a conveyor belt of plot in three acts: tempus edax, tempus fugit, tempus imperator – time the devourer, time flies, time the ruler.

This is not a tale of mythic proportions but a domestic drama set in rural Ireland at the end of the 20th century. On the surface, Where Are the Kings is a straightforward bildungsroman. After his mother drowns herself and his father descends into mental infirmity, twelve-year-old Jack is entrusted into the care of his maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles. Under the tutelage of his benevolent uncles, Theo and Haulie, he is taught to hunt, fix cars and live life again; through the tenderness of his aunt Rose, he experiences sexual awakening. But in seeking to make sense of his mother’s unlikely suicide, Jack loses his grip on reality. If Sophocles wrote Greek tragedy and Yeats wrote Celtic Revival tragedy, Ryan writes Celtic Tiger tragedy.

Ryan pays homage to his classical touchstones with tremendous subtlety, setting our protagonist on his quest for answers in a quietly recognisable, transitional Ireland of the 1990s. In one of a number of nods to Yeats, we are told at the beginning of Act Three that ‘entropy is the tendency