by JULIET WATERS

In Norse mythology, there’s a powerful brew called the “mead of poetry.” How Odin acquired this drink is a pretty complicated tale, but it winds down with Odin disguised as an eagle, flying back to the home of the Norse gods, pursued by the giant he’s stolen it from. To save the mead, Odin basically pukes it into a bowl as he’s flying overhead, but a few drops of his dribble trickle down to Earth. Whoever drinks the actual poetry mead is blessed with brilliance. Whoever drinks the dribble is a temporary master of nonsense.

I don’t know what Dustin Long’s been drinking to come up with a tale as wacky and fantastic as Icelander, but as long as it eventually wears off, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of it. There are moments, especially in the first pages, when Long’s first novel glimmers with comic brilliance, and there are moments when the faint stench of dribble sets in. Maybe it’s poetry mead spiked with ormolu tea, a powerful drink that we are told is “gaining popularity in topside Iceland, though it has yet to make a successful market-shift to the United States.”

Unfortunately I googled “ormolu tea” and it only seems to show up on emilybean.com, a fake Web site Long has created to honour one of Icelander’s more important characters. Though we never meet Emily Bean, her legend haunts this novel and the life of her daughter. Known only as Our Heroine, she is the resistant heir to Emily Bean’s reputation as a master criminologist. Kind of like a light parody of a female Hamlet, Our Heroine would like nothing more than to escape the expectations that she will follow in her mother’s footsteps. The last thing she wants is to spend her life drawn into capers like The Case of the Consternated Cossacks. She’d much prefer to spend her life as an alcoholic, somewhat slutty academic, but her main skill—the ability to drink anyone under the table—seems to come in pretty handy as an Icelandic sleuth... and as the dustcover helpfully forewarns us, “Evil has no interest in her lack of interest.”

And so Our Heroine is drawn into the mysterious death of Shirley MacGuffin, “a continually aspiring author whose prose was matched in ambition only by its pretentiousness.” MacGuffin was in the process of writing her own version of Hamlet. The murderer may have hoped to pass this off as the famous version written by Thomas Kyd, which academic lore believes pre-dated Shakespeare’s version.

The search for this murderer is further muddled by the appearance of two “philosophical investigators,” kind of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the story and postmodern multitaskers. “We take on mundane cases such as murder and missing persons as a sideline to support our investigations into the larger Mysteries that others pass over in silence.”

And then there’s Nathan, a Hollywood actor who bears a striking resemblance to Ethan Hawke. Throw in a Norse goddess, a half-human ex-husband, some other characters like a rogue library-scientist, a beloved missing Dachshund and a trickster named Snurt, add some entertaining if digressive footnotes and you get quite the meandering literary funhouse. Part Da Vinci Code, part Nancy Drew, and fortunately a very small part Infinite Jest.

Long writes more like a verbal trickster than a traditional novelist, and there are times when the tricks wear a little thin. If the novel were a little more engaging, one might be tempted to go back and solve, or speculate on some of the puzzles Long incorporates into the story. In the end, however, Icelander probably won’t be everyone’s cup of ormolu tea. But for quirky minds cluttered with more literary trivia than is probably good for them, Icelander is like the poetic version of a good bender.

Icelander by Dustin Long, McSweeney’s, hc, 249pp, $31