We came from nowhere and found we belonged nowhere else,” says Francis Hanrahan, the troubled young hero of Dermot Bolger’s fiercely beautiful novel “The Journey Home” … Old Ireland, perennially emerald green in the mists of memory, is dead and gone, Dermot Bolger wants us to know. This is news no Irish-American is keen to hear, which might explain (not justify) why this book has had such a long passage across the Atlantic… it is one of the few Bolger novels in print in the United States, and that’s a crying shame… The Journey Home seems, at times, like an Irish “Rebel Without a Cause”: it is, like that 1955 James Dean film, the coming-of-age story of young people who seem to veer helplessly between wanting everything to change – now – and wanting everything to stay the same forever. Bolger conveys that painful ambivalence vividly, with his urgent prose. This is a mournful book, but not a glum one, really: the writer’s love of his agonized characters and his unsettled homeland is unmistakable and redemptive. There is, as the young know and the old are prone to forget, a weird exhilaration about going all the way, even if where you find yourself is a little scary. “The Journey Home” does go all the way, and then some… Talk about rough beasts: even the Duke might cower at the sight of that one slouching toward him. Wherever the “real” Ireland is or was or will be, there are great chunks of it, with the smell and texture of Irish earth, in Dermot Bolger’s rich, conflicted, ferociously vital book. This is a novel full of rage and full of melancholy and full, to overflowing, of home truths.