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Threshold by Rob Doyle review – chasing intangible chemical highs

Long before the English-language rise of autofiction, Geoff Dyer figured out the benefit of keeping shtum about what you’re up to, genre-wise. Novel, memoir, essay? Let readers decide; he’s just writing. Works such as 1997’s Out of Sheer Rage, about not writing a biography of DH Lawrence, or 2003’s druggy travelogue Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, owe their charm in large part to this candid lack of artifice, which was, of course, anything but.

Rob Doyle would have been in his early 20s when Yoga... came out, and it clearly left a mark. His new book, Threshold, likewise takes the form of 11 freewheeling, pharmaceutically messy vignettes in which a not-so-young literary man roams far-flung locales; Dyer, whose praise for Doyle appears on the jacket, even has a walk-on part.

Narrated with an appealing blend of wide-eyed curiosity and no-bullshit scepticism, the episodic tale charts the 20s and 30s of a Dublin philosophy graduate, Rob (naturally), whose wanderlust stems partly from his fear that he won’t be able to pen a magnum opus in his childhood bedroom, although Ireland’s 2006 ban on the sale and possession of magic mushrooms has something to do with it too.

While it’s no straight Bildungsroman, the book’s span charts Rob’s shift from a sexually frustrated language teacher in Sicily, to an apparently in-demand author meeting his publisher in Zagreb and casually seducing an Algerian divorcee while on the train home from reporting on the Roberto Bolaño tourist trail in the Costa Brava.

The fronting masks a sincere interest in the nigh-on impossibility of communicating a mind-altering experience

Along the way mind-bending quantities of drugs are ingested. There’s a cocaine binge with Parisian theatre luvvies speculating about when Michel Houellebecq will end up beheaded. Ayahuasca sessions in Bogotá fuel notions of a PhD on Nietzsche “and Amazonian shamanism” – a project Dyerishly abandoned, same as a book narrated by Arthur Schopenhauer’s poodles. “I had made it a point of pride to write only when I felt like it,” he says. “The problem was, I almost never felt like it.” On a visit to Georges Bataille’s grave, he suddenly loses interest, boozily lunching alone instead, before realising he can’t find it anyway (“I returned to my hotel and did a Google image search on my phone”).

The itinerant structure keeps things fresh, serving up increasingly wild scenarios, including a game of psychological cat-and-mouse with a Kurdish artist who claims to have slept with two of the 9/11 hijackers in her teens. Added intrigue about Doyle’s purpose comes from interludes giving us the narrator’s half of a correspondence with an ex-lover, recalling his wish “to write a book whose binding tissue is not overt narrative but obsessions, fascinations… visions of my life as it is or might have been”.

There’s enough wriggle room to ensure we don’t get hung up on, say, whether Doyle really has pissed in a stranger’s mouth at a Berlin nightclub. But troubling our pieties is part of the point, in any case, with one especially splenetic passage giving both barrels to the confusion of artistic merit with “a humanitarian worldview”. Rob’s own sex-and-death existentialist chic isn’t exempt; using ketamine in Kashmir was, he thought, “important research at the limits of consciousness, but I see now I was just getting fucked up on a boat”.

As in Dyer, that fronting masks a sincere, even earnest interest in the nigh-on impossibility of communicating a mind-altering experience, whether it’s Rob’s paralysis when setting about an essay on his favourite author, the Romanian EM Cioran, or the “deeply alien, sometimes shocking vistas” he glimpses under the influence of DMT.

Chasing intangible chemical highs ultimately ends up a proxy for the strange business of writing itself, as a quest not merely for experience, but its re-creation. As Rob says, almost poignantly: “It wasn’t enough, somehow, just to be.”

Threshold by Rob Doyle is published by Bloomsbury Circus (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15