Patrick Mccabe
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By: Harper Perennial
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
Call this a snooze 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.
McCabe's best novels, "Butcher Boy" and "Breakfast on Pluto," managed to convince you that, despite the melodramatic and even ridiculous predicaments that the twisted cartoonish narrators were placed in by their author, a true and distinctive voice expressed his tormented view of Ireland. In "CMTB," the Charlie Manson-meets-Nikolai Gogol, Steppenwolf-Tarantino influences would have made for a decent novella, but nothing can sustain a reader faced with hundreds of pages of snippets from his briefly productive but ultimately solipsistic life. While a couple of the treatments he gives are engrossing on their own, and show how the hundreds of pages have been distilled into genuinely engrossing condensations, the effort expected of a reader to sift through so much dross to find the diamond is likely to discourage all but a McC fan who simply must read his every effort. This rivalled "The Dead School" for tedium, which is unfortunate given the dramatic potential of that and this book.
Even Ardal O'Hanlon's "Knick Knack Paddy Whack,"a first-time effort I found remaindered, offered as much fireworks. For a novelist of McCabe's proven abilities, "CMTB" is slacking off.
If, as the blurb tells us, it took five years to write, perhaps he should take ten per novel, like his fellow Border craftsman John McGahern. Nothing's shocking or compelling this go around.Three examples: what was his rival Johnston's "Cyclops" thriller all about? Jimmy alludes to its contents in a sentence but given his jealousy towards his plagiarising mentor, why not elaborate? The stint in Mountjoy takes a few pages--whole years go by, with little from his incarceration to influence the rest of the novel, except to mark time, I suppose, and speed up the chronology. I found it curious that the narrative voice went into 3rd person briefly around pg. 296, and I hoped that--late in the game--this portended a fresh angle, but the end dribbles out into a series of dissipated conclusions, none of them that surprising given the unrelenting dreariness of the story.
Compared to noteworthy recent Irish fiction from the northern regions treating similar themes and situations--as disparate as John McGahern (By the Lake), Colin Bateman (Cycle of Violence and Divorcing Jack), Glenn Patterson (Burning Your Own and Number 5), Robert McLiam Wilson (Eureka Street and Ripley Bogle) and Niall Griffith (A Welsh version--in Sheepshagger), Mc Cabe's tale of inflatable dolls, IRA thugs, ennui, drugs, and autodidacts seems tired and exhausted.
Editorial Review:
With T. S. Eliot's words as his guide, Joey Tallon embarks on a journey toward enlightenment in the troubling psychedelic-gone-wrong atmosphere of the late 1970s. A man deranged by desire, and longing for belonging, Tallon searches for his"place of peace" -- a spiritual landscape located somewhere between his small town in Northern Ireland and Iowa ... and maybe between heaven and hell.
