On a Wednesday night so dark and wet it has cleared the Sligo streets of life, PW arrives at Patrick McCabe's terraced house in the center of town and immediately feels like an intruder into a scene of everyday domestic turmoil. McCabe, a two-time Booker Prize nominee, is cursing a computer that will not allow his 13-year-old daughter to go on-line in search of information on the Titanic. It's for a school assignment, she complains; he tells her to look it up in a book; she tries once more to connect, failing again. More mutterings at the screen are drowned out by the sounds of other householders marching from room to room upstairs. The telephone rings, and a young girl -- the author's other daughter, presumably -- shouts that it'll be for her. Leading us to the relative calm of the kitchen, McCabe clears away the remains of the family dinner, deposits the dishes in the sink and sets to making a large pot of coffee. Just when we are settled in at the table to begin, McCabe is called to the telephone, to which he lends one ear while with the other he monitors the commotion from above.
It's a scene of such blazing normality that squaring it with McCabe's mischievous fiction, which takes place in a landscape of distracted, collapsing sanity and features characters ranging from the bizarrely dysfunctional to the comically murderous, is a difficult, if not impossible task. Indeed, dressed casually in an old pinstripe jacket, T-shirt and jeans, and surrounded by the detritus of home life, the 43-year-old author, considered a sort of high priest of rural Irish dementia, seems out of place. His world seems, however cluttered, wholly sane. But such incongruity may in fact be the key to understanding the worlds he creates in his fictions.
McCabe's conversation, once we get down to it, is peppered with references to Walter Pater, Graham Greene and European art, but also Bob Dylan, the films of Sam Fuller and a range of 1960s science fiction films. He speaks soberly and seriously of his new novel, the Booker-nominated Breakfast on Pluto, out this month from Harper Collins (Forecasts, this issue, p. 55). While pausing to respectfully tip his hat to James Joyce and Carson McCullers, he arrives at the more Technicolor description of the book as "Roy Lichtenstein g s to Leitrim" -- evoking both the garish coloring of Breakfast on Pluto and the Irish county in which much of the story is set. He g s on to describe a planned collection of short stories as being like "a mondo movie about a small Irish town in the 1960s; Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, after a feed of drugs."
In his fiction, too, gleeful ambiguity is the name of the game. Served up in a chatty, colloquial narrative voice, his darkly satirical burlesques strut the line between comedy and horror, while his characters are equal parts lovable and chilling. In his breakthrough third novel, the Booker-nominated The Butcher Boy (Dial, 1993), a disturbed 13-year-old narrator slays his best friend's mother and terrorizes his home town while remaining on the outside a likable young charmer. His next work, The Dead School (Dial, 1995) focused on an increasingly psychotic school teacher locked in battle with a drug-addled, love-lorn colleague, both of whom remain sympathetic, after a fashion. McCabe's latest offering, which completes a thematically linked trilogy begun with The Butcher Boy, features one Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a transvestite rent boy from small-town Ireland with IRA connections, a beehive haircut and an endearing Dusty Springfield fixation. A grown-up version of Francie Brady, eponymous hero of The Butcher Boy, 19-year-old Pussy is perhaps the first gender-bending prostitute ever to appear in a Booker-nominated novel, and is certainly the first character of his kind in Irish literature. But as the domestic normality around the author emphatically underlines, just because he has created Pussy and a clutch of other off-the-wall kooks d sn't mean McCabe is himself anything other than ordinary, the author says.
"A lot of people read the books and believe I must be some sort of freaky-deaky dude," he protests, when asked where his bizarre cast of characters actually comes from. "But that's not the case at all. It's not that difficult to put yourself inside the head of a character, and it's no more difficult to put yourself in the mind of a transvestite prostitute than it is to put yourself in the mind of a boy whose heart is broken and who chops up a woman. Writing is like method acting. You sit down and do the work and just switch off when it's over."
Which is probably just as well, given the exploits of his latest creation. Set largely during an IRA bombing campaign in the early 1970s, the new novel traces Pussy's decline from effeminate youth in an Irish border town to the back streets of a London gripped by fear and hatred and under siege from terrorist explosives. Mixing lyrical prose with a range of narrative voices and chronologies -- a departure for McCabe, whose previous novels have had linear structures -- the book emerges as an archly ironic comedy of horrors that hurls the reader from laughter to repugnance, often in the space of a single phrase. Despite the lurid subject matter, McCabe insists the book is about bigger things than the central character's sexual preferences. "It's about politics and borders and gender borders," he explains, stroking a tightly-clipped beard and mulling over every word. "It wasn't a deliberate step into political fiction, but I grew up in the 1970s when you couldn't avoid politics, and it would have been remiss of me and ignoble to walk away from something that's crying out to be written about. "
Career Hopping
The second of five children, McCabe was born in 1955 near the Northern Ireland border in Clones, Co. Monaghan. A late convert to literature, he was obsessed with American music and culture, devouring comics (he still has a collection of favorites from his childhood) and seeing as many as 10 Hollywood movies a week. He trained as a teacher in Dublin and taught in a variety of schools by day, but raced around Ireland's theaters and dance halls by night, playing keyboard with a popular cabaret band who specialized in country-and-western covers. He always considered himself a writer, however, and eventually faced the choice of turning professional musician or devoting his energy to novels.
In 1985 he hung up his amps and moved with his family to London, where he taught for eight years and wrote in his spare time. But that is not to say that he has discarded music. On the contrary, he begins a novel not with a plot but with a mood, usually suggested by a song or lyric. Although it deals in the currency of terrorism and sexuality, Breakfast on Pluto itself was inspired by a kitschy 1969 U.K. hit by Don Partridge, and is filled with references to music and songs of the early 1970s.
In 1986, McCabe published his first novel, Music on Clinton Street (the title was lifted from the Leonard Cohen song "Famous Blue Raincoat." His second effort, Carn (published here as a Delta trade paperback in 1997) attracted positive reviews, but he seemed destined to remain in relative obscurity until, in 1992, and seemingly out of nowhere, The Butcher Boy appeared to near-universal acclaim. The Booker nomination brought further attention, and when director Neil Jordan bought the rights to the book, McCabe was granted the financial wherewithal to quit teaching and devote himself full-time to writing. One of his first projects was to collaborate on the screenplay with Jordan, who has also purchased the rights to the new novel. The film was released in 1997 and featured a hilarious cameo by the author himself as town drunk Jimmy the Skite. McCabe remembers his brush with the silver screen fondly: "That wasn't acting," he laughs. "It was just being drunk." As well as financial independence and a move back to Ireland, the international success of The Butcher Boy book and film brought more than a few multi-book offers. But McCabe has never believed in selling something he hasn't yet written, and continues to deal on a one-book-only basis. It frees him from pressure to produce, he says. "Going on these odd journeys is so much a part of my personality that I want to go there alone," he maintains. "I don't want someone coming along with me to ask how the journey is going, and reminding me that they've bought the ticket."
Breakfast on Pluto came out of a particularly arduous two-year journey. Writing entirely in longhand, he produced an uncharacteristically long first draft for a novel he intended to be short and spare, and credits his U.K. editor John Reilly (now at Faber) with helping deliver the final draft. But McCabe faced further difficulties with the book: American publishers wanted nothing to do with it. He still seems genuinely puzzled, and perhaps a little hurt, at the reaction the manuscript received stateside.
"Everybody who read it said it was madcap and funny and camp, but that there wasn't enough story to it," he recalls. "A lot of them prefaced their comments with 'Having adored The Butcher Boy I was deeply disappointed...' Maybe they just didn't get what the book is about."
McCabe remained convinced the novel had an audience. Exasperated with the progress of American representatives, he gave the novel to Irish agent Marianne Gonne O'Connor, an old school friend he describes as among the most gifted agents in the world, and within a couple of weeks she had placed the book with Paul McCarthy at HarperCollins. "What turned it was that I found an editor who understood the book," McCabe explains matter-of-factly. "McCarthy turned out to be one of the most brilliant editors I've ever worked with. He knew instinctively what I was doing."
The subsequent Booker nomination was a vindication of his and his editor's belief in Breakfast on Pluto, McCabe says. "You develop the skill of being stoic in the face of rejection early in your writing life and if people smack you around, you just have to endure it," he says. "Even more than a selling point, the nomination is a vote of favor and confidence in a book people were shaky about."
Next on the author's schedule is a diversion away from literature, and into another apparent incongruity. Along with Irish lounge singer Jack L., the author has recorded a 2-CD set of readings and performances with accompanying music, for release next year. He intends touring North American theaters and concert halls in support of the release in January. "There's something very electric that happens to an audience when the rhythm of a sentence dovetails almost perfectly into the beginning of a ballad or the chords of a song," he says. "I do it for that, and because if you're living in your imagination all day long making up stories, and have no other way to interact with the human race, it's a very unhealthy place to be sometimes." The return to music is unlikely to amount to more than a one-off, however. Although he has no plans for new fiction beyond a collection of short stories scheduled for late 1999, McCabe says he remains tied to the routine of writing and domesticity.
"Writing novels is a bit like being a seamstress," he says. "It's a stitch at a time, and if you're away for three weeks and have to come home to start again, the whole thing is unraveled. All those things that turn your life upside down ultimately interfere with the kind of dull, ordinary monotony that is essential for writing fiction."
And while he is anything but dull and monotonous, McCabe is as far from Pussy Braden and the confused terrain of Breakfast on Pluto as it's possible to imagine. Bidding farewell to PW at his front door, he already has one eye on the computer that had earlier blocked his daughter's schoolwork. Interview over, he is no longer the chronicler of fractured Irish lives and creator of macabre, cracked characters, but an ordinary father who has to get the kids ready for school the next morning.
