Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (1992, 215 pages)

Butcher Boy is the second novel my Patrick McCabe I have so far read.   The first was Call Me the Breeze.  Butcher Boy is by far his best known work.   It has received praise from many sources and won or as shortlisted for several awards.

It is a kind of coming of age story of a psychotic killer set in a small Irish town.  In a way it is just another Irish story of a weak vicious drunken father who takes out his frustrations in life on his wife and son but it is so skillfully enters the mind of the central character that it transcend this category of novel.  Much of the story revolves around a family that looks down on the family
of Francis and his terrible hatred for them.   The story is narrated by Francis and his perspective on life is psychotic, violent and very cramped.  I would not describe this as a pleasant read but it compelling and you will be forced ever onward as things get worse and worse until a terrible senseless conclusion is reached.

Butcher Boy is, I think, a modern a Irish must read.  There is extreme violence in this novel.  There is a lot of material about pigs and their slaughter as Francis works as a pig killer.

I will, I hope, read more of the work of McCabe.

Mel u

Call Me the Breeze by Patrick McCabe (2004, 352 pages)

I really wanted to read as my first novel by Patrick McCabe (1955, Ireland) his highly acclaimed The Butcher Boy but it is not as of now available as Kindle edition (it on Amazon UK so maybe it will be available soon).  I looked through the novels he did have in Kindle editions and Call Me the Breeze sounded like the one I was most likely to appreciate.  

Call Me the Breeze is set in the madness of the 1970s, LSD, Charles Manson, "Howl" and all that.   The lead character, Joey Tallon lives in a small Northern Border town in a cramped trailer.  He ends up being sent to prison for kidnapping.  While in prison he begins to get into reading, and not junk, he is heavily into T. S. Eliot and Tagore.  Some of the convicts begin to write poetry while inside, he starts to keep a diary.   Once he gets out of jail he makes a very deluded at first seeming effort to get his diary turned into a novel and a movie.  He keeps trying to get Bono and Joni Mitchell interested.   He begins to turn his life around.  Before he went to jail he was an overweight slacker working in a bar mooning over a girl that wants little to do with him.   Believe it or not his novel is published, and by a big name company that specializes in literary fiction.   Incredibly his novel is made into a movie.  There is one big problem, his movie revealed too much about underworld elements, people he got to know in prison.  

The narrative structure is complicated and a bit hard to follow at times.  Joey recalls conversations with a deceased friend he calls, "The Seeker", a kind of early 1970s guru figure.  He begins to fantasize about Charles Manson, he comes to call him "The Gardener".   He does read have very good taste in literature, he is heavily into Gogol (he has much of Dead Souls committed to memory), he loves Herman Hesse, especially Siddhartha, T. S. Eliot, William Burroughs and he went crazy the first time he read Alan Ginsburg's "Howl"  (Raise your hand if you did the same thing).  McCabe is showing us how his reading transformed Joey, how he became a writer, how he created a self out of the wreckage of his life.   Joey ends up running for office!   He has numerous love interests and some of them might actually be real.  He does ponder one of the great questions of modern literature-does having a romantic encounter with your father's life size sex doll count as incest?

I admit I loved these lines and I bet a lot of other people did too (even Beckett fans) : "That Allen Ginsberg. ‘Howl’! ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness — starving, hysterical, naked!’ and all that shit. What good was Beckett after that? Three arseholes sitting in dustbins arguing about sweet fuck all and, just when you think it’s all over they start up again.

This was a fun novel to read and I enjoyed it a lot.  I hope to read The Butcher Boy as soon as it is available as Kindle.  

Mel u

"The Hands of Dingo Deery" by Patrick McCabe

"The Hands of Dingo Deery" by Patrick McCabe  (2002, 21 pages)

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One of my goals during Irish Short Story Week Year III is to read new to me Irish writers.   Patrick McCabe has been short listed two times for the Booker Prize, for Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both of which have been made into movies. ( I would have probably already read Butcher Boy if it were available as a kindle.)   My advance research indicated his work can be strange, almost psychedelic and "The Hands of Dingo Deery" sure lived up to that advance press!

It is set in Ireland.  It begins as an official statement of a detective inspector, Norman Jenkins, Willesden Police Station.   Willesden is located in North London and has a very large Irish population. Dermott Mooney has been arrested for assaulting a constable.   At first they think him a mad man, after all he did throw himself through the roof of a cinema.   He  requested he be given, he is in jail, an opera cape and some writing paper.  He has written the story of his life.  The inspector says "I defy all staff to read it and then think, 'all this man is fit for is punching policemen and drinking cans of McEwan's Export".   The rest of the work is the story of how one Dingo Deery ruined his life.

It looks like Dermot  has been in jail for years and it his story is flat out crazy for sure and tremendously fun to read and a darn sight difficult to figure out at times.  His story begins thirty years ago in the Irish midlands.  He used to spend his summers in the company of his uncle, a pretty well known ornithologist. He would accompany his uncle on lectures and help him with the projector and such.  The lectures go well and the man enjoys traveling around Ireland with him.  There is one problem only.  There is a man, Dingo Deery, who would show up wild eyed looking during some lectures and scream at his uncle that he knew nothing about birds and was good for nothing but beating up poor scholars.

This story is just so strange and so beautifully told I do not intend to retell more of it as I could not do justice to it anyway.  The story of how he wound up in jail is really a great one.   I read this in The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing edited by John Somer and John J. Daly.