Rather than pursue riches from the kind of novels he didn't care to write, Holland decided to fight the tides and navigate his own path. But even he had no idea how he was going to pitch his next book idea to long-time publisher Barry Scott at Transit Lounge.

When Holland told fellow writer Chris Womersley he was writing a novella about Saint Brendan of Clonfert, the sixth-century Celtic monk and adventurer whose life's quest was to find heaven on Earth, Womersley sighed, "Why do you do it to yourself?"  "I know," Holland conceded, "I should write a book about grand larceny or something."

Much to his credit, Scott commissioned delicate Japanese ink paintings from Junko Azukawa to illustrate Holland's reimagining of St Brendan's epic quest of self discovery. The result is Navigatio, a melodic journey of mind and spirit, poetry and prose, of light and darkness, faith and doubt that meditates on man's eternal search for meaning.

Holland is a respected but often underrated Australian writer with a pilgrim's propensity for puzzling out life's mysteries. Loss pervades The Mary Smokes Boys, the book that made his name. Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Prize and shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year, the novel follows motherless Greywood North, who falls in with the wild boys of the town Mary Smokes with terrible consequences.

Brisbane-based Holland followed that book with the short story collection, Riding the Trains in Japan, and The Darkest Little Room, a literary thriller set in Ho Chi Minh City, which is to be made into a feature film by Scott Street Films, whose founders worked on various episodes of The Slap and with Chris Lilley.

"There are times when a phone bill comes through and I think, 'What the hell am I doing? Why don't I just write sci-fi and crime and make the dough and run?'." He pauses. "I probably wouldn't be able to write a vampire book. I'm too far gone. It's too late."

For Navigatio Holland drew on the spirit of medieval scholarship in which manuscripts are not an "ossified statement of a genius as we take today but rather an organic investigation. The monks would take a book and transcribe it, add a bit and pass it around. The idea of embalming a book, saying it's done, was foreign."

From Galway, Brendan sets out with seven pilgrims to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a curragh made of mountain ash and oxhide to find Arcadia, not knowing where "the hard lines of the world end". Along the way, Brendan is beached on strange islands, and encounters mermaids, dragons and sea monsters. He sails into the teeth of storms and, in the turmoil of his own heart, is visited by demons and angels.

Holland says there is evidence enough to believe Brendan made it to Newfoundland and Iceland. "I'm sure he got [to America] before Columbus."

In the parable of Saint Brendan, Holland says he saw something of his own restlessness. His hints of a romance pushing Brendan offshore are Holland's invention, and arise from his own belief that our longings to travel are the desire to escape troubles and reclaim lost innocence, wonder or romance. "Journey is something I've been writing about from the get go, even in a weird way The Mary Smokes Boys was where people felt stuck and wanted to escape."

Holland says his principal purpose in Navigatio is to invoke beauty with words, and in the spaces, repetition and silences on the inked page. In this, he was stylistically influenced by ancient Japanese writing, the idea that the shape and form of words can connect the soul to the divine.

"I approach writing as I imagine a flower arranger [does]: 'that one's nice next to that, maybe put that one further here'; and that is as intellectual as I get when I'm composing - what looks beautiful next to what. As James Joyce said, 'the right words in the right order'."

Navigatio

Patrick Holland

Transit Lounge, $29.95