PATRICK McCABE long has been recognized as a stunningly audacious and accomplished writer.
His disturbing but brilliant new novel, "Winterwood," benefits from both those qualities and something more: McCabe's ambition to extend Irish literature's deep Gothic tradition into a completely contemporary context. His successful realization of that aim makes this book a bleak and haunting little masterpiece.
Readers familiar with McCabe's earlier novels know that no writer in contemporary fiction can contrive quite so enthralling an antihero -- most memorably Francie Brady, the psychotic young slaughterhouse worker who is the first-person narrator of "The Butcher Boy" (1992), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted for film by Neil Jordan. In "Winterwood," McCabe has, in essence, bifurcated Francie.
Redmond Hatch is a moderately successful Dublin journalist, assigned by his newspaper to return to his native village, the mountain hamlet of Slievenageeha, to report on the vanishing local traditions. There he falls under the sway of a mysterious and sinister fiddler and storyteller, Ned Strange. The residents of a new suburbia extending its reach into the valley of Slievenageeha see Ned as a colorful local character and eagerly send their children to his Saturday morning \o7ceilidhs\f7 (traditional Gaelic dances). Redmond, however, joins Ned in his cabin for nightlong drinking binges, and soon a darkness crowds out the charm. Ned may or may not have murdered his unfaithful wife, who may or may not have been Redmond's mother. Little by little, the secrets of a claustrophobic Irish mountain valley dribble out, including Redmond's dim but horrific memories of what may have been his mistreatment at the hands of a beloved uncle.
Meanwhile, Redmond's marriage dissolves over his wife's infidelity, and he is bitterly separated from Imogen, the young daughter he loves. When Ned commits suicide after being arrested and imprisoned for molesting a young boy, Redmond's life falls to pieces. Alone and out of work, he assumes a new identity, reinvents himself as an admired documentary filmmaker, but then begins to fall to pieces again, in the face of what may be madness ... or possession by the horrific Ned's ghost.
In hands less skilled than McCabe's, this would be melodrama or -- at best -- absurdity. But he is a masterful writer and he has fashioned a mesmerizing parable out of an improbable fiction.
