There is a telling scene in Louise Young’s debut novel Icarus where a somewhat pragmatic character remarks of recent mystical events that “This is beyond the beyond.” Indeed, the novel, which tends to defy categorization (new age? sci-fi? adventure?), has its share of fantastical moments where legend, landscape, and psychic and erotic possibilities meet and merge. Unfortunately, these metaphysical blurrings often happen at the expense of solid story and complex characterization.

Icarus is named after its ambitious protagonist, a handsome hillbilly dreamer living in an unnamed city in British Columbia in a run-down hotel and imagining a better, more moneyed life for himself. Trained by his father as a water diviner, Icarus stumbles upon an old prospector’s map one day, and, convinced it shows the way to the “Lost Lemon Mine,” enlists the help of his brothers and several of their friends to hunt for the treasure.

The first part of the novel is devoted to exposing the group’s tangled emotional dynamics as they hike into the mountain wilderness. Love triangles and buried rivalries emerge at every step on the trail, with the alternately oblivious and clairvoyant Icarus leading the way. This introduction to the story’s cast relies heavily on exposition and rhetorical interruptions, a strategy that makes it difficult to relate to the characters, who seem designed less as humans with particular faults and joys than mythical archetypes.

In the second half, a hidden, otherworldly dimension reveals itself to Icarus’s gang through a series of visions. The parallel world Young describes is home to a tribe of people more ancient and evolved than the motley crew of gold diggers. There is much metaphorical possibility in this construct, and the meeting of the two worlds brings a momentum to the story that was previously lacking. Again, though, the narrative voice tends to intrude, transforming what could have been telling scenes between compelling characters into overwrought poetic tableaus.