Happily going along for the ride

THERE’S a good chance that after reading Craig Ferguson’s impressive debut novel you’ll want to tune in to CBS’ “The Late Late Show” simply out of curiosity. It isn’t often that one comes across a talk show host who can hold his own as a literary storyteller.

Imagine Johnny Carson crossed with Kurt Vonnegut. Although that analogy isn’t perfectly accurate, it is the kind of colorful merger that would be right at home in the pages of Ferguson’s colorful chronicle, “Between the Bridge and the River.”

The story of four (ultimately interconnected) characters and their life journeys begins simply enough. Two 13-year-old boys, George and Fraser, are fishing in a canal in rural Scotland, although neither really believes there’s a fish to be caught. Still it’s a peaceful adolescent bonding experience that over the course of six pages becomes a pivotal moment of lost innocence.

With that exit from paradise, the author is off and running across continents, introducing characters and situations that mix the profane with the sacred, the mundane with the magical, the real with fantasy.

George grows up to be a suicidal lawyer and Fraser becomes a disgraced televangelist. Then there are “The Holy Fools,” Leon and Saul, brothers cursed with a narcissistic, delusional mother, who worked as a Las Vegas showgirl back when the Sands was a hot casino and the Rat Pack was cooling down.

Leon grows up being told that he’s the offspring of Sinatra. Being blessed with a beautiful singing voice, he sees no reason to doubt it. Who needs DNA? Saul on the other hand is devoid of any magic or talent except making money by selling his brother and God to the glamour-chasing, spiritually hungry masses.

Ferguson knows how to maintain an artful balance. Deep cynicism is softened with wit and wisdom. An agent might be described as a shark, but she likes “to think of herself as a victim of the cruel sea.” The author’s birthplace, Glasgow, minus the dirt and soot that has been erased by urban renewal, becomes “Disneyland in the rain: sad and wrong.” Kids on the outer rim of the high school universe become “Plutos in the nerd galaxy.”

Ferguson takes you to the abyss then shows you the stars. He delivers the dirty news, but in a way that makes you feel cleaner for having been told the truth. His style and subject matter are so engrossing that even if you prefer more conventional storytelling, you’ll gladly follow him into a world where the calendar gets tossed because, as he puts it, “[t]ime is only linear for engineers and referees.”

This allows for all kinds of inventive maneuvers, including cameo appearances by the likes of Carl Jung, Socrates and Fatty Arbuckle. If this sounds a little like a twisted magical mystery tour, it is -- but one with a well-thought-through itinerary that hits stops in Birmingham, Ala., and Crawford Creek, Fla., as well as Hollywood, Glasgow and Paris.

By novel’s end, all the odd scenarios and even odder people (Is there anything odder than a snake-handling Pentecostal Baptist?) start to connect. You begin to see that all journeys might lead to the same fork in the road: Redemption? Or maybe not.

Of course redemption, like everything else in this book, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. This doesn’t mean that things get wrapped up neatly, but they do come to a satisfying conclusion, which happens the moment the story takes a leap off the bridge and heads toward the river -- no parachutes in sight.

In Ferguson’s world, we don’t need them.

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Carol Wolper is the author of the novels “The Cigarette Girl,” “Secret Celebrity” and, most recently, “Mr. Famous.”