The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

"I was thinking how right ma was--Mrs Nugent all smiles when she met us and how are you getting on Mrs and young Francis are you both well?...what she was really saying was: Ah hello Mrs Pig how are you and look Philip do you see what's coming now--The Pig Family!"

This is a precisely crafted, often lyrical, portrait of the descent into madness of a young killer in small-town Ireland. Short-listed for the Booker Prize.

The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

The Modern Gothic in full flow, 02 Oct 2007
After reading McCabe's Modern Gothic classic 'The Dead School' for my A-level English Literature course, I was inspired to search out his other works. I have just finished reading 'The Butcher Boy' and don't quite know how to react! I can only describe the style of narrative as a kind of 'fragmented stream-of-consciousness' - the narrator is a disenfranchised boy, Francie, living in late-1950s Ireland who loses his mother and father to suicide and drink respectively and subsequently becomes violently obsessed with well-brought-up schoolboy Philip Nugent, whose own family is in many ways the antithesis of Francie's.
Packed full of bizarre characters such as the paedophilic priest, 'Tiddly', who Francie exploits whilst having a spell in approved school (for defecating on Mrs Nugent's carpet no less!) and Francie's Uncle Alo, with his unrequited love for Francie's mother making him just one example of the sad and deluded lives contained within the book. The tale has enough of the gothic within it to remind me of 'The Wasp Factory', whose narrator leads a similarly confused existence, however the end is far more cruel and will surely have you feeling pity for Francie, no matter how monstrous he has become.

the tragedy of fading love, 01 Dec 2006
Well, I read this book many years ago but it still resonates with me today. It's the unusual mix of innocence and hurt expressed via a young lad with a great turn of phrase..the comical voice makes the tragedy all the more poignant. Seeing the enthusiasm Francie has for comics, friends and his parents slowly ebb away has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories in literature.
The film by Neil Jordan is a great adaptation..check out the soundtrack. Also, read the liner notes to the cd...one of the saddest but truest pieces of writing..about the tragedy of love not lasting forever (the underlying theme of the novel) Everything just seems to come together perfectly in this story. Very highly recommended. One of my favourite novels ever. Superb.

Uncomfortable reading with some wry smiles thrown in, 14 Aug 2006
The story of a young Irish boy called Francie who never quite gets the help he needs and ends up killing someone in a particularly brutal way.

Being written in the first person, it is hard to judge when the main character turns from tear-away young boy to twisted killer. It's a darkly comic book, with most of the comedy coming from Francies gleeful observations of people and places. It's also a very dark book and not always a comfortable read. The quality of the writing is compelling though. Patrick McCabe has written this in a naturalistic style, and although the story seems a little ramshackle at first, it is actually cleverly constructed with missing 'bits' of the story dropped in with subtlety and finesse.

I disagree with other reviews on one point - Francie never finds 'peace', he's mad and has the logic of a mad person. He doesn't see himself as mad or that what he's done is wrong. The events that occur are to him simply the logical outcome of a journey tainted with tragedy.

That's why this book was compelling, as a reader you accompany Francie on his descent into madness. You are a witness to the disintegration of his mind as all around him starts to fall apart and how almost imperceptibly he starts to lose the plot.

thats so irish!, 03 Sep 2001
Patrick McCabe manages to convey Francie Brady's childhood so well he makes us relate it to our own. The realism of a childs humor in this book is as cruel as the murder itself. Patrick McCabe, a man who's book was so awesome i couldn't put it down.

a very sad but very readable book, 14 May 2001
At first I found this difficult to read, no punctuation was very strange. But once I had got the hang off it I couldnt put the book down. I found this book very sad and disturbing at times. An excellent book.

Patrick McCabe hit paydirt with his third novel The Butcher Boy, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism". In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also Booker-shortlisted, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate; ventriloquising perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the fourth form, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story, and as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. -- Alan Stewart

The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

The Modern Gothic in full flow, 02 Oct 2007
After reading McCabe's Modern Gothic classic 'The Dead School' for my A-level English Literature course, I was inspired to search out his other works. I have just finished reading 'The Butcher Boy' and don't quite know how to react! I can only describe the style of narrative as a kind of 'fragmented stream-of-consciousness' - the narrator is a disenfranchised boy, Francie, living in late-1950s Ireland who loses his mother and father to suicide and drink respectively and subsequently becomes violently obsessed with well-brought-up schoolboy Philip Nugent, whose own family is in many ways the antithesis of Francie's.
Packed full of bizarre characters such as the paedophilic priest, 'Tiddly', who Francie exploits whilst having a spell in approved school (for defecating on Mrs Nugent's carpet no less!) and Francie's Uncle Alo, with his unrequited love for Francie's mother making him just one example of the sad and deluded lives contained within the book. The tale has enough of the gothic within it to remind me of 'The Wasp Factory', whose narrator leads a similarly confused existence, however the end is far more cruel and will surely have you feeling pity for Francie, no matter how monstrous he has become.

the tragedy of fading love, 01 Dec 2006
Well, I read this book many years ago but it still resonates with me today. It's the unusual mix of innocence and hurt expressed via a young lad with a great turn of phrase..the comical voice makes the tragedy all the more poignant. Seeing the enthusiasm Francie has for comics, friends and his parents slowly ebb away has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories in literature.
The film by Neil Jordan is a great adaptation..check out the soundtrack. Also, read the liner notes to the cd...one of the saddest but truest pieces of writing..about the tragedy of love not lasting forever (the underlying theme of the novel) Everything just seems to come together perfectly in this story. Very highly recommended. One of my favourite novels ever. Superb.

Uncomfortable reading with some wry smiles thrown in, 14 Aug 2006
The story of a young Irish boy called Francie who never quite gets the help he needs and ends up killing someone in a particularly brutal way.

Being written in the first person, it is hard to judge when the main character turns from tear-away young boy to twisted killer. It's a darkly comic book, with most of the comedy coming from Francies gleeful observations of people and places. It's also a very dark book and not always a comfortable read. The quality of the writing is compelling though. Patrick McCabe has written this in a naturalistic style, and although the story seems a little ramshackle at first, it is actually cleverly constructed with missing 'bits' of the story dropped in with subtlety and finesse.

I disagree with other reviews on one point - Francie never finds 'peace', he's mad and has the logic of a mad person. He doesn't see himself as mad or that what he's done is wrong. The events that occur are to him simply the logical outcome of a journey tainted with tragedy.

That's why this book was compelling, as a reader you accompany Francie on his descent into madness. You are a witness to the disintegration of his mind as all around him starts to fall apart and how almost imperceptibly he starts to lose the plot.

thats so irish!, 03 Sep 2001
Patrick McCabe manages to convey Francie Brady's childhood so well he makes us relate it to our own. The realism of a childs humor in this book is as cruel as the murder itself. Patrick McCabe, a man who's book was so awesome i couldn't put it down.

a very sad but very readable book, 14 May 2001
At first I found this difficult to read, no punctuation was very strange. But once I had got the hang off it I couldnt put the book down. I found this book very sad and disturbing at times. An excellent book.

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple

Clever yet strangely uninvolving, 20 Aug 2000
This is an easy read, with interesting if rather sad characters, admirably written - yet somehow it left me completely cold. I failed to appreciate the relevance of the Irish setting, too. It could have been anywhere for the purposes of the main character and his history. I finished feeling sure (yet again) that I must have missed something important.

Brilliant, 15 Mar 2000
Pat McCabe does it again. With his unique wit and black humour, we are invited into the life of a transvestite IRA bomber. It makes you really realize how funny life is. McCabe might not be for everyone, but I am always prepared to read what he's publishing!

Patrick McCabe hit paydirt with his third novel The Butcher Boy, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism". In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also Booker-shortlisted, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate; ventriloquising perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the fourth form, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story, and as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. -- Alan Stewart

The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

The Modern Gothic in full flow, 02 Oct 2007
After reading McCabe's Modern Gothic classic 'The Dead School' for my A-level English Literature course, I was inspired to search out his other works. I have just finished reading 'The Butcher Boy' and don't quite know how to react! I can only describe the style of narrative as a kind of 'fragmented stream-of-consciousness' - the narrator is a disenfranchised boy, Francie, living in late-1950s Ireland who loses his mother and father to suicide and drink respectively and subsequently becomes violently obsessed with well-brought-up schoolboy Philip Nugent, whose own family is in many ways the antithesis of Francie's.
Packed full of bizarre characters such as the paedophilic priest, 'Tiddly', who Francie exploits whilst having a spell in approved school (for defecating on Mrs Nugent's carpet no less!) and Francie's Uncle Alo, with his unrequited love for Francie's mother making him just one example of the sad and deluded lives contained within the book. The tale has enough of the gothic within it to remind me of 'The Wasp Factory', whose narrator leads a similarly confused existence, however the end is far more cruel and will surely have you feeling pity for Francie, no matter how monstrous he has become.

the tragedy of fading love, 01 Dec 2006
Well, I read this book many years ago but it still resonates with me today. It's the unusual mix of innocence and hurt expressed via a young lad with a great turn of phrase..the comical voice makes the tragedy all the more poignant. Seeing the enthusiasm Francie has for comics, friends and his parents slowly ebb away has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories in literature.
The film by Neil Jordan is a great adaptation..check out the soundtrack. Also, read the liner notes to the cd...one of the saddest but truest pieces of writing..about the tragedy of love not lasting forever (the underlying theme of the novel) Everything just seems to come together perfectly in this story. Very highly recommended. One of my favourite novels ever. Superb.

Uncomfortable reading with some wry smiles thrown in, 14 Aug 2006
The story of a young Irish boy called Francie who never quite gets the help he needs and ends up killing someone in a particularly brutal way.

Being written in the first person, it is hard to judge when the main character turns from tear-away young boy to twisted killer. It's a darkly comic book, with most of the comedy coming from Francies gleeful observations of people and places. It's also a very dark book and not always a comfortable read. The quality of the writing is compelling though. Patrick McCabe has written this in a naturalistic style, and although the story seems a little ramshackle at first, it is actually cleverly constructed with missing 'bits' of the story dropped in with subtlety and finesse.

I disagree with other reviews on one point - Francie never finds 'peace', he's mad and has the logic of a mad person. He doesn't see himself as mad or that what he's done is wrong. The events that occur are to him simply the logical outcome of a journey tainted with tragedy.

That's why this book was compelling, as a reader you accompany Francie on his descent into madness. You are a witness to the disintegration of his mind as all around him starts to fall apart and how almost imperceptibly he starts to lose the plot.

thats so irish!, 03 Sep 2001
Patrick McCabe manages to convey Francie Brady's childhood so well he makes us relate it to our own. The realism of a childs humor in this book is as cruel as the murder itself. Patrick McCabe, a man who's book was so awesome i couldn't put it down.

a very sad but very readable book, 14 May 2001
At first I found this difficult to read, no punctuation was very strange. But once I had got the hang off it I couldnt put the book down. I found this book very sad and disturbing at times. An excellent book.

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple

Clever yet strangely uninvolving, 20 Aug 2000
This is an easy read, with interesting if rather sad characters, admirably written - yet somehow it left me completely cold. I failed to appreciate the relevance of the Irish setting, too. It could have been anywhere for the purposes of the main character and his history. I finished feeling sure (yet again) that I must have missed something important.

Brilliant, 15 Mar 2000
Pat McCabe does it again. With his unique wit and black humour, we are invited into the life of a transvestite IRA bomber. It makes you really realize how funny life is. McCabe might not be for everyone, but I am always prepared to read what he's publishing!

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple

Clever yet strangely uninvolving, 20 Aug 2000
This is an easy read, with interesting if rather sad characters, admirably written - yet somehow it left me completely cold. I failed to appreciate the relevance of the Irish setting, too. It could have been anywhere for the purposes of the main character and his history. I finished feeling sure (yet again) that I must have missed something important.

Brilliant, 15 Mar 2000
Pat McCabe does it again. With his unique wit and black humour, we are invited into the life of a transvestite IRA bomber. It makes you really realize how funny life is. McCabe might not be for everyone, but I am always prepared to read what he's publishing!

The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

The Modern Gothic in full flow, 02 Oct 2007
After reading McCabe's Modern Gothic classic 'The Dead School' for my A-level English Literature course, I was inspired to search out his other works. I have just finished reading 'The Butcher Boy' and don't quite know how to react! I can only describe the style of narrative as a kind of 'fragmented stream-of-consciousness' - the narrator is a disenfranchised boy, Francie, living in late-1950s Ireland who loses his mother and father to suicide and drink respectively and subsequently becomes violently obsessed with well-brought-up schoolboy Philip Nugent, whose own family is in many ways the antithesis of Francie's.
Packed full of bizarre characters such as the paedophilic priest, 'Tiddly', who Francie exploits whilst having a spell in approved school (for defecating on Mrs Nugent's carpet no less!) and Francie's Uncle Alo, with his unrequited love for Francie's mother making him just one example of the sad and deluded lives contained within the book. The tale has enough of the gothic within it to remind me of 'The Wasp Factory', whose narrator leads a similarly confused existence, however the end is far more cruel and will surely have you feeling pity for Francie, no matter how monstrous he has become.

the tragedy of fading love, 01 Dec 2006
Well, I read this book many years ago but it still resonates with me today. It's the unusual mix of innocence and hurt expressed via a young lad with a great turn of phrase..the comical voice makes the tragedy all the more poignant. Seeing the enthusiasm Francie has for comics, friends and his parents slowly ebb away has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories in literature.
The film by Neil Jordan is a great adaptation..check out the soundtrack. Also, read the liner notes to the cd...one of the saddest but truest pieces of writing..about the tragedy of love not lasting forever (the underlying theme of the novel) Everything just seems to come together perfectly in this story. Very highly recommended. One of my favourite novels ever. Superb.

Uncomfortable reading with some wry smiles thrown in, 14 Aug 2006
The story of a young Irish boy called Francie who never quite gets the help he needs and ends up killing someone in a particularly brutal way.

Being written in the first person, it is hard to judge when the main character turns from tear-away young boy to twisted killer. It's a darkly comic book, with most of the comedy coming from Francies gleeful observations of people and places. It's also a very dark book and not always a comfortable read. The quality of the writing is compelling though. Patrick McCabe has written this in a naturalistic style, and although the story seems a little ramshackle at first, it is actually cleverly constructed with missing 'bits' of the story dropped in with subtlety and finesse.

I disagree with other reviews on one point - Francie never finds 'peace', he's mad and has the logic of a mad person. He doesn't see himself as mad or that what he's done is wrong. The events that occur are to him simply the logical outcome of a journey tainted with tragedy.

That's why this book was compelling, as a reader you accompany Francie on his descent into madness. You are a witness to the disintegration of his mind as all around him starts to fall apart and how almost imperceptibly he starts to lose the plot.

thats so irish!, 03 Sep 2001
Patrick McCabe manages to convey Francie Brady's childhood so well he makes us relate it to our own. The realism of a childs humor in this book is as cruel as the murder itself. Patrick McCabe, a man who's book was so awesome i couldn't put it down.

a very sad but very readable book, 14 May 2001
At first I found this difficult to read, no punctuation was very strange. But once I had got the hang off it I couldnt put the book down. I found this book very sad and disturbing at times. An excellent book.

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple

Clever yet strangely uninvolving, 20 Aug 2000
This is an easy read, with interesting if rather sad characters, admirably written - yet somehow it left me completely cold. I failed to appreciate the relevance of the Irish setting, too. It could have been anywhere for the purposes of the main character and his history. I finished feeling sure (yet again) that I must have missed something important.

Brilliant, 15 Mar 2000
Pat McCabe does it again. With his unique wit and black humour, we are invited into the life of a transvestite IRA bomber. It makes you really realize how funny life is. McCabe might not be for everyone, but I am always prepared to read what he's publishing!

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple

Clever yet strangely uninvolving, 20 Aug 2000
This is an easy read, with interesting if rather sad characters, admirably written - yet somehow it left me completely cold. I failed to appreciate the relevance of the Irish setting, too. It could have been anywhere for the purposes of the main character and his history. I finished feeling sure (yet again) that I must have missed something important.

Brilliant, 15 Mar 2000
Pat McCabe does it again. With his unique wit and black humour, we are invited into the life of a transvestite IRA bomber. It makes you really realize how funny life is. McCabe might not be for everyone, but I am always prepared to read what he's publishing!

Disappointing, 15 Aug 2008
I found the first half of this novel really creepy and gripping...then it all started to get a bit repetitive and the mimicking of an unhinged mind derailed the narration so much it largely diluted the suspense which had been craftily and steadily built up til then. I could hardly be bothered finishing it. Am i the only reader who thought that Redmond ended up taking on elements of Ned Strange's personality (not so odd when there are so many heavy hints of them being related, psychically if not genetically), abducting his daughter and killing her and eventually also killing his ex-wife Catherine? Winterwood was the mythical place he visited post-murder to relive obsessively the happier times he had had with them.

mc cabe s best?, 09 Nov 2007
REALLY A GREAT READ.I READ THIS BOOK IN TWO SITTINGS AS I COULDENT PUT IT DOWN!
SIMILAR IN THEME TO SOME OF HIS OTHER BOOKS BUT NONE THE WORSE FOR THAT.
ONE OF THE MOST ENJOYABLE[IN A BLACK WAY] BOOKS THAT I HAVE READ IN QUIET
A LONG TIME.I WOULD STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO ANYONE.
ENJOY!


Clever and absorbing., 11 Oct 2007
This is an involving and very creepy tale from one of Ireland's most original writers. I'm not going to go to great lengths to divulge the plot (other reviewers have already done that!); all you need to know is that it is an intimate first person narrative of a very damaged mind, and it's very difficult to pull back from. Frankly, I'm not going to bother my head over whether or not it's a parable of modern Ireland; it's a compelling read. I would agree with the comment made by an earlier reviewer, to the effect that if you emphatically don't like Patrick McCabe, don't read his books. Whether or not McCabe is a literary genius is something you could argue over for hours, but it's a fact that he's one of the best at what he does out there at the moment. Interestingly, the negative reviewer didn't give any examples of the 'weightier' gothic literature that he claims to prefer. Might that be because he fears exposing his own taste to citicism? Or is it that he simply can't honestly think of any genuine examples?
I'm not sure if 'enjoy' is the right word to use for the reading of 'Winterwood', but it certainly makes an impression.

Stories within stories within stories., 05 Sep 2007
Raymond Hatch only wants the best for his wife and child, but is haunted by the ghostly figure of Ned Strange, a famous Irish storyteller, though one recently convicted of the abuse and murder of a child. Raymond has come through a difficult childhood of his own and wants a better life in London, but when his wife and child leave his mind fractures and the reader is asked to sift through the remaining fragments. We meet his mad Uncle Florian, who shares characteristics of Ned Strange, and the motley crew of vagrants and muggers Raymond has to deal with as he freefalls from normal, everyday life. Are the stories of a sudden career in TV to be trusted? Should we believe Raymond's wife had an affair? Or should we take more notice of the glimpses suggesting Raymond could in fact be Ned Strange's alter-ego or, at least, a close relation? When two more people go missing and are feared dead in the Winterwood mountains, the narrative hurtles to a terrifying end. McCabe is a wildly variable writer, capable of great things in 'The Butcher Boy' but seemingly throwing away his talent in recent years. But this, this is the real thing, a perfect, astonishing novel.

Unsettling, 16 Jul 2007
Winterwood is a short novel - the narrative of Redmond Hatch. Redmond is an underachiever, having never quite made it in journalism or in various jobs around London. Redmond fails, too, to make family life with his wife Catherine and daughter Imogen quite work. There are little triumphs, but not enough to sustain expectations.

As Redmond's home life and career fall apart, so does his mental health. He is not allowed access to Imogen - although whether this was before or after his own mental deterioration is never quite clear - and this causes his whole life to fall apart. He fakes his own death, traces Catherine and Imogen back to Dublin and tries to reestablish contact with Imogen in the only way he knows how.

Throughout the narrative, Redmond is haunted by Ned Strange, an old and creepy man from Redmond's home village of Slievenageeha. Quite how and when the two first met is, perhaps, ambiguous. But they did meet and Ned's stories start to haunt Redmond. The haunting starts to become literal as Redmond descends into greater madness.

At the same time as the madness develops, Redmond briefly enjoys some success as a television producer and finds a second wife. For a brief while, it seems as though Redmond might turn a corner. But the past starts to catch up again with him, and he finds that the demons are still there. Jealousy, rejection, loneliness and guilt. Redmond's obsession with Ned increases as he believes he is actually turning into Ned.

Redmond's voice is chaotic. He hops about from one point in time to another, making the sequencing and chronology difficult to follow. This is quite important, as it disguises which actions are causes and which are the effects. Despite this, the actual writing is lucid and, in places, of poetic beauty. It is dreamily written without ever feeling overwritten.

It is clear from early on that Redmond has issues, being obsessed with children and their books and toys; he seems to have had a pretty hideous childhood and probably suffered abuse; and he has a strong sense of being an innocent man who has been wronged. This is powerful and disturbing. The flaws in the narration are understandable, but Redmond is never likeable enough for the reader to feel real sympathy for him. I suspect this makes Redmond less likely to attract cult status than Frankie, the star of The Butcher Boy. But at the same time, it probably makes Redmond more credible. The lurid, cartoon quality of Butcher Boy makes way for gothic realism.

This is an unsettling novel, but well worth reading. Just shy of a five star rating.

The Dead School, 14 Feb 2007
I have to admit to a near miss faux pas here. Having discovered Patrick McGrath a few weeks ago, I myopically plucked The Dead School from the library thinking it was another McGrath. For the first half hour, I wondered at the author's ability to transform his phizog so much with the mere addition of a generous lawn of facial hair.
But McCabe and McGrath do have similarities . Both are Irish writers who write in a deceptively simple way. Both favour narrators and protagonists who you might not trust in a crisis. And both play with a sense of foreboding, making oblique references to forthcoming events.
The Dead School centres on the lives of two Irish men. Raphael Bell is born in 1913 ( a tiny pedantic niggle here - on page 33, McCabe mentions the death of a 40 year-old woman born in 1926 - which makes it 1966 - and then goes on to say Bell is 63 at this point - which places his birth year in 1903. Then a few pages later, he tells us Bell was born in 1913.). Bell grows up a loved son of happily married parents. He experiences first hand the traumatic death of one parent (I don't want to reveal too much) but manages to go on to shine at both school and teacher training college, excelling in both sports, academia and 'fair but firm' disciplinarianism. He becomes a head teacher at an impressively young age and builds the reputation of his school up so that it is reknown nationwide.

Meanwhile, Malachy Dudgeon is born a couple of generations later. His parents are not so blissfully in love. He also loses a parent in traumatic circumstances and emotionally closes his heart to his remaining parent. He enters teacher training college in a totally different era - the swingling sixties are just over and attitudes are so lax they're almost stoned. He doesn't take to teaching as naturally as Bell. Their paths eventually cross, to disastrous effect.

McCabe addresses his reader in a teacherly style, much like Graham Swift in Waterland, which was also the story of a traumatised teacher. The reader is never left in doubt of the black endings hovering on the transiently rosy horizon. We are introduced to the priest at Bell's school, Stokes, at a time when Bell and Stokes are have just met in pleasant circumstances, but McCabe lets slip ominously that Bell will soon loathe Stokes:

' 'Yes' said the young fresh-faced priest whose name was Desmond Stokes and who would one day be almost insanely loathed by the man whose hand he now shook, and whose heart would eventually also break'.

In a similar vein, we are thrown into Dudgeon's first euphoric love affair with the unsettling knowledge that it will all end in heartbreak. It is all the more bitter as Dudgeon's decades-long cynicism about the existence of love has only just been shaken off.

The ending, when it comes, is as tragic as you expect, but there is also humanity. McCabe has created a world in which sweet, happy endings are a Nutrasweet myth but his ability to show people's ability to love in spite of the malicious jokes life plays offers hope.
__________________




Even more engrossing than I expected., 18 Sep 2003
Having read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. For a teacher, the situations he conjures may be nightmarish--rude and surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Sad and touching, 21 Dec 2002
A quietly gripping book that draws you in gently with some fine writing, very black humour and the wonder of falling in love. As the two main character's lives begin to fall apart it's like watching a train crash, something awful is going to happen but you can't look away. A great study of disintegrating personalities and what happens when life just doesn't quite work out as you expected.

Dark, depressing and strangely humorous., 29 Jul 1999
A fantastic book, cleverly written. The development of the two characters is gripping, and the consequence of their meeting is grotesque, unimaginable, yet believable. Do NOT read this book if you are either a teacher, or you love "Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! If you enjoyed "The Butcher Boy", then I am sure that you will enjoy this book too.

Very strange, but I still couldn't put it down..., 21 Jun 1999
Strange. I'm not used to books like that, but I still enjoyed it. It took imagination and an open mind, but I recommend it if only for a change of pace. Give it a shot, you could be surprised!

The Modern Gothic in full flow, 02 Oct 2007
After reading McCabe's Modern Gothic classic 'The Dead School' for my A-level English Literature course, I was inspired to search out his other works. I have just finished reading 'The Butcher Boy' and don't quite know how to react! I can only describe the style of narrative as a kind of 'fragmented stream-of-consciousness' - the narrator is a disenfranchised boy, Francie, living in late-1950s Ireland who loses his mother and father to suicide and drink respectively and subsequently becomes violently obsessed with well-brought-up schoolboy Philip Nugent, whose own family is in many ways the antithesis of Francie's.
Packed full of bizarre characters such as the paedophilic priest, 'Tiddly', who Francie exploits whilst having a spell in approved school (for defecating on Mrs Nugent's carpet no less!) and Francie's Uncle Alo, with his unrequited love for Francie's mother making him just one example of the sad and deluded lives contained within the book. The tale has enough of the gothic within it to remind me of 'The Wasp Factory', whose narrator leads a similarly confused existence, however the end is far more cruel and will surely have you feeling pity for Francie, no matter how monstrous he has become.

the tragedy of fading love, 01 Dec 2006
Well, I read this book many years ago but it still resonates with me today. It's the unusual mix of innocence and hurt expressed via a young lad with a great turn of phrase..the comical voice makes the tragedy all the more poignant. Seeing the enthusiasm Francie has for comics, friends and his parents slowly ebb away has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories in literature.
The film by Neil Jordan is a great adaptation..check out the soundtrack. Also, read the liner notes to the cd...one of the saddest but truest pieces of writing..about the tragedy of love not lasting forever (the underlying theme of the novel) Everything just seems to come together perfectly in this story. Very highly recommended. One of my favourite novels ever. Superb.

Uncomfortable reading with some wry smiles thrown in, 14 Aug 2006
The story of a young Irish boy called Francie who never quite gets the help he needs and ends up killing someone in a particularly brutal way.

Being written in the first person, it is hard to judge when the main character turns from tear-away young boy to twisted killer. It's a darkly comic book, with most of the comedy coming from Francies gleeful observations of people and places. It's also a very dark book and not always a comfortable read. The quality of the writing is compelling though. Patrick McCabe has written this in a naturalistic style, and although the story seems a little ramshackle at first, it is actually cleverly constructed with missing 'bits' of the story dropped in with subtlety and finesse.

I disagree with other reviews on one point - Francie never finds 'peace', he's mad and has the logic of a mad person. He doesn't see himself as mad or that what he's done is wrong. The events that occur are to him simply the logical outcome of a journey tainted with tragedy.

That's why this book was compelling, as a reader you accompany Francie on his descent into madness. You are a witness to the disintegration of his mind as all around him starts to fall apart and how almost imperceptibly he starts to lose the plot.

thats so irish!, 03 Sep 2001
Patrick McCabe manages to convey Francie Brady's childhood so well he makes us relate it to our own. The realism of a childs humor in this book is as cruel as the murder itself. Patrick McCabe, a man who's book was so awesome i couldn't put it down.

a very sad but very readable book, 14 May 2001
At first I found this difficult to read, no punctuation was very strange. But once I had got the hang off it I couldnt put the book down. I found this book very sad and disturbing at times. An excellent book.

Breaking out in style, 25 Aug 2006
I love this book. The story is brilliant, full of clever humour and can be quite shocking really. I don't think I've seen a book written in such a way before, it is a compelling read and page turner.

If you like Irish wit as I do, covering what used to be taboo issues set in a time when Ireland was dealing with IRA troubles, then buy it, you won't be disappointed. It doesn't take long to read, but what do you read sticks with you for quite a while. Enjoy.

Search for belonging in the ý60s and ý70s, 24 May 2005
'Breakfast on Pluto' introduces Patrick 'Pussy' Braden, born in 1955 in an Irish border village of Tyreelin in the thick of political trouble, and dumped unceremoniously into the care of Hairy Ma Braden, 'the Baby Farmer' leaving a young Patrick to work out his origins and develop a sense of belonging. This is very much Pussy's story - transvestite, cabaret performer, prostitute and self-described 'sad nutty fairy' - scribbled down with inimitable style as Pussy struggles to find meaning in his life in London through the '60s and '70s. I had some trouble empathising overly with Pussy's situation, especially as he uses people in much the same way as they use him. Pussy's increasingly drugged-up narration makes it hard work for the reader to separate fact from fiction and, whilst overall McCabe has fairly convincingly captured Pussy's voice, the tone wasn't as incisive, acerbic or downright bitchy as I would expect from a drag performer used to defending their appearance or a sex-worker leading a rough life.

Curiously, a number of chapters of 'Breakfast on Pluto' concern IRA events in which Pussy has no direct involvement - indeed, the main narrative of Pussy's story seems largely, almost entirely, disconnected from IRA issues. Nevertheless, in terms of content, these chapters are amongst the most interesting and effective in the book: Pussy's childhood friend Irwin Kerr would have made a particularly interesting character for further development. Despite suffering somewhat from structural and character-development problems, overall, 'Breakfast on Pluto' is a challenging and entertaining read: as an added bonus, Pussy's narrative comes with its own soundtrack of the times that guarantees going to bed humming classics like 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' or Lindsay de Paul's 'Sugar Me'.

Looking for love in all the wrong places., 23 Dec 2002
With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other thing