The Red Mouth Author: Sheila Armstrong ISBN-13: 978-1526691125Publisher: Bloomsbury CircusGuideline Price: £16.99, 240ppMarch on an Irish bog, and a man watches as his lurcher digs into the heather. More than watches: he joins in, compelled, obsessed; and an object is at last wrestled from the wet ground. The man drags it home, washes it down: it is an ancient elk antler, and now the man wonders what he will do next, how many laws he has broken, when he will be found out. The man is Patch, which is a name one might give to a dog, but the lurcher – who has no name – is described in as least as much detail: her family history, her character, her array of phobias are set out by a measured narrative voice with patient respect. Patch himself feels not much by way of patience or respect for this creature: “he wished then that he had chosen a cat for company instead, or even a lava lamp.” And all of this finding, digging, unearthing and bringing home is related patiently too, in a mode that feels almost like real time.So begins The Red Mouth, Sheila Armstrong’s dazzling second novel, and already in these opening pages the concerns and themes of the narrative are coming into focus: the impact of the past upon the present; the physical and psychological imprint of deep time upon how we live today; and the perils that flow from the human habit of cracking the world open just to see how it works.Armstrong brings together a group of disparate characters, showing how individual lives and experiences are braided to create a history: alongside the troubled Patch we meet an ambitious archaeologist and his daughter, and a young environmental scientist, all of whose lives are in thrall to this place, its secrets and its possibilities. Their stories are as layered as the bog itself, the more so as the narrative advances month by month, through a calendar year, with experiences laid down and stripped away. Our culture is apt to imagine that time is buried, that all that is past lies tucked away: and Armstrong’s achievement in this tremendous novel is to put paid to such notions, to remind us that the past breathes and casts its spells minute by minute across our daily lives.Neil Hegarty is an author and critic