Paul Duane reviews the latest novel from the celebrated author of The Butcher Boy, Breakfast On Pluto and Winterwood.
Whatever I write about Pat McCabe has to be contextualised by this: I have known the man well for thirty years now, been mouldy drunk with him, been sober and remorseful with him, broken my lifelong 'no festivals' rule to dive into the madness of his much-missed Flat Lake Festival, discussed his obsessions - grindhouse cinema, middle-of-the-road entertainment telly, and the secret history of Ireland and its long and complex relationship with the word, both written and spoken – with him to the point where reading his new novel feels like a continuation of this thirty-year conversation.
In his new novel Goldengrove, the obsessions are present and correct. There are shades of the infamous Kincora Boys' Home, here renamed Ravensbrook, there’s Phil Silvers, Sgt Bilko himself, listening tearfully to a recitation of Philip Larkin’s Dublinesque in a rural pub, there’s a mysterious bomb atrocity in a Dublin grindhouse cinema, a cameo by the Shankill Butchers, and an unnerving portrait of the British intelligentsia’s view of Ireland – a dire land, Ballyturnip, the ‘atoll of despair’. Irish laughter, here, is "a guerilla activity of the mind’.
Listen: Pat McCabe talks to Oliver Callan
The POV is that of Chenny, Chenevix Meredith, who was once a third-rate British theatrical agent with an office on Grafton Street, and who may or may not have been an MI5 operative with the blood of many people on his hands, now retired to a seaside boarding house somewhere near Brighton with nothing to do but remember. And possibly to murder his old colleague Henry Plumm.
But the plot is never the thing in a McCabe novel. Here as in many of his books, the story is already over when the book begins, and the narrator, as unreliable as any you will find in literature, is speaking as one who has already given up, forgotten by the world. "You can almost feel the loneliness pouring out of him", as McCabe writes here.
But he also provides dark hints of evil deeds, gory deaths awaiting characters who, when they are introduced, are still hale and hearty with their whole lives ahead of them.
The effect is akin to spending time with the assemblages of the US artist Ed Kienholz, whose three-dimensional set-pieces, layered with grimy, seedy imagery and the underbelly of popular culture, reveal themselves gradually as you examine them, focusing on the little details.
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Listen: Creatives In Conversation - Pat McCabe talks to Rattlebag in 2003
Goldengrove has something of that same creepy stasis. Time doesn’t move forward, all of the past is contained in the present, if you look at it deeply enough. And if you do, you might well regret what you see.
The thing that sticks with you about McCabe’s writing, as with Philip K Dick’s or Jim Thompson’s, is the unmistakeable tone of voice – what you could call his ‘Feral Culchie Motormouth’ mode.
When The Butcher Boy came out, Francie Brady’s compulsive, often hilarious, sometimes extremely disturbing voice was unprecedented in Irish literature. It’s hard to describe now how important and explosive that brilliant book was.
Now its descendants are everywhere. The McDonagh brothers, Martin and John, mixed McCabe with Tarantino to create a highly commercial ‘sparkling Feral Culchie’ diffusion line of plays and films. Francie’s voice – deadpan, angry, marginalised - is audible in the videos of Rubberbandits alumnus Bobby Fingers and in the other impertinent rural voices that have broken Dublin 4’s grip - Kevin Barry, the Mary Wallopers, Tommy Tiernan, maybe in Kneecap’s surreal black wit, too.
As a corollary to how influential his work has been, McCabe himself has become less celebrated, less visible in recent times so it’s a huge pleasure, with this and his previous novel Poguemahone, to see him rising into view again, like some legendary behemoth of Irish literature, as crucial to Irish identity as Godzilla is to Japan, as beloved, and as unstoppable.
Goldengrove is published by Unbound - find out more here
