breakfast on pluto
Patrick McCabe
Picador, #15.99
PATRICK McCabe's fifth novel is cross. It is comic. It is tragedy cross-dressed as comedy. It is a bitter political satire disguised as streetwise reportage on sex-wars.
Within its comparatively few pages (200) the transvestite replaces Mother Ireland as iconic image for a male-ruled but matriarch-dominated nation. Patrick Braden, son of the local priest, was conceived and born in ''the small enclosed village'' of Tyreelin, County Monaghan. A nationalist area on the Republic side of the border. When the book opens he is ''Old Mother Riley'' living off London's Kilburn, writing his memoirs at the behest of his psychiatrist. Paddy, in better days, has been Pussy, a ''perfumed creature of the night'', with a business address, ''The Meat Rack, Piccadilly Circus''. That was in the early seventies, bomb-encrusted days in Belfast and London.
Once a figure of both derision and devotion, Patrick/Pussy's ''life and times'' could be lethal weapons in several propaganda wars. Defeat is the only form of discretion open to him. ''Fiction rules OK'' screams off his bedsit wall. In dreams, the graffiti within his mind hums either the gay hymn that is Dusty Springfield's Windmills of Your Mind or the slip-and-tuck of Don Partridge's 1969 hit, Breakfast on Pluto.
Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, in 1955. It abuts Innishkeen, birthplace of the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.
Tyreelin is soul-image of Innishkeen, where, in Kavanagh's epic The Great Hunger (1942), impotent Patrick Maguire is tied to an aged mother in a barren countryside. Bleakly, it notates a reverence for an absent sexuality.
McCabe, a great admirer of Kavanagh, left Ireland for London where he worked as a teacher and musician. Critical acclaim for his novels Music on Clinton Street (1986) and Carn (1989) was followed by the sensational success of The Butcher Boy (1992), which is now a major film.
His most recent novel was the atmospheric and deeply disturbing The Dead School (1995). It, too, was set in the seventies. At that time McCabe was in secondary classrooms by day and in the evenings played the Irish pubs and dance halls with Paddy Hanrahan and the Oklahoma Showband.
A tabloid-manipulated anti-Irish campaign in the wake of IRA mayhem and murder made London a grim place to be Irish in those days. Those were rancid and malevolent times. McCabe, through Pussy/Patrick, is sharp as a recording angel on conspiracy and collusion. In a recent interview in the Irish Times, he recalls '' . . . it was a period of not knowing'', and, though normally reticent about commenting on the Troubles, states of his new novel: ''It is very political, I think.''
Deviating politics and their practitioners always have a ridiculous dimension. Unicyclists trapped between railway tracks, leading to a built-up tunnel. The world of the transvestite is also complex but, if only for its practitioner, ridiculously liberating. It is this notion of examining a nation's psyche through extremities that makes McCabe's book such a rewarding read.
In case this makes the young Irish writer seem prematurely earnest, it is worth noting for his admirers that he is currently working on two projects entitled Mondo Desperado, and Emerald Germs of Ireland.
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