At some point, there's a large and interesting essay to be written on why so much of the most interesting new English-language fiction comes to us from Indian and Irish writers.
When it is, there ought to be a substantial section devoted to Patrick McCabe, who is superficially the most visceral and, in fact, one of the most clever of the entire glittering Celtic contingent. "The Holy City" is his ninth novel and, at first blush, may seem like a curious return to a well-plowed field.
McCabe first came to American readers' attention more than a decade ago with a pair of sensational novels -- "The Butcher Boy" (1992) and "Breakfast on Pluto" (1998) -- both of which were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. They also introduced a couple of the author's literary signatures: propulsive first-person narration and protagonists at once mesmerizing and horrifying -- in the case of those early novels, a youthful serial killer and a transvestite prostitute involved with the IRA. Both are set in the grim small towns of the Irish midlands. McCabe, who was born in Clones and later taught school in Longford, knows that territory first-hand.
John Banville, who is himself a Man Booker winner and the former literary editor of the Irish Times, calls McCabe a true original: "Like Roddy Doyle writing about life in working-class Dublin suburbs, McCabe has used stuff the rest of us didn't bother with and made a peculiar kind of rough poetry out of it. He catches that particular kind of bizarre, insane world of Irish country life in the '50s and '60s. People like [Sean] O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor wrote about it in lyrical mode, [John] McGahern wrote about it in tragic mode, but McCabe writes about it in a kind of antic black comedy that is absolutely unique."
In the new Ireland
That dark, antic sensibility is full-throated in "The Holy City." This time around, the setting is the fictional Cullymore, a place -- like so many in contemporary Ireland -- on its way from small town to modern bedroom suburb. That suits the novel's first-person narrator, Chris McCool, just fine because his hometown's newly minted, atomized anonymity is just the sort of cover he relishes. Now 67, Chris is (superficially, at least) happily reliving the swinging young manhood he may or may not have enjoyed in the 1960s.
