Patrick McCabe (1) (1955–)

I found The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe a powerful, engrossing and disturbing read. Young Francie Brady never really stood a chance at having a normal life. His father spent all his time in the local, drinking and feeling sorry for himself for how his life had turned out. Francie’s mother, whom he loved very much, had emotional problems and at one point is taken off to the ‘mad-house’. After his parents have a particular nasty fight, Francie runs away. He makes it to Dublin, but show more misses his mother, his friends and his village and so returns. He buys a present for his mother, hoping that will make her happy. Unfortunately, while he was gone his mother had killed herself. His father tells him it was Francie’s fault that she did this and he responds by withdrawing further into his violent fantasy world.

He takes against one particular family; in particular the mother, Mrs. Nugent and her son, Philip, but it’s obvious that he longs to have his mother back and in such a close, caring and safe relationship. As his obsession grows stronger, Francie’s behavior gets worse and worse until he crosses the line from mischief to madness. A spell in reform school under the care of priests only served to make him worse. When he gets back home, he picks up a job at the local butcher’s, which of course, doesn’t help. The author never uses quotation marks so I found I had to read carefully to figure out who was talking, also Francie was so into his strange visions that the reader had to figure out what was really taking place and what was just happening in his head. Even with these difficulties, this is a book that I am glad that I didn’t miss.

The Butcher Boy was a violent, pitiful, sometimes funny and exhausting read. I felt almost traumatized by being placed in Francie’s mind and experiencing the blurring of his reality taking form. You can’t help but feel compassion for this young man even as he shocks and revolts you. The content of Francie’s mind is horrific, but his inner voice can be quite funny. In the end you are left wondering if things would have been different if this boy had only been nurtured on love and hope instead of indifference and despair. This will definitely be a book that I will remember as much for it’s uniqueness as for it’s unrelenting darkness. show less

The Holy City is unreliably yet truthfully narrated by another of McCabe’s mentally unstable characters, Christopher J. McCool, currently, in his late sixties, a resident of his own little abode he refers to as “The Happy Club.” McCool’s heyday was the 1960s, when he reveled in the music and wild dress. His town, Cullymore, was changing radically as the world changed. The story switches between then and present time.

The product of an illicit liaison between his protestant mother and show more a catholic, McCool was not allowed to live with her as a child, only seeing his mother during her furtive visits. McCool has never quite recovered from his abandonment and the scorn of his father.

McCabe doles out McCool’s truth in small bites, hint, and intimations, skillfully. His obsessions and disappointments are the basis for a danger that is never quite spelled out, but can be deduced. show less

"I climbed in the back of the chickenhouse and just stood in there in that woodchip world listening to the scrabbling of the claws on tin and the fan purring away keeping the town going. When we were in there me and Joe used to think: Nothing can ever go wrong. But it wasn't like that any more."

Set in a small town in Ireland in the early 1960's against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis and just prior to the start of The Troubles, The Butcher Boyis a disturbing view inside the mind of show more a troubled young boy, Francis "Francie" Brady. Told from Francie's point of view in a garbled stream of consciousness style of writing, this story is a deeply disturbing first person perspective of a child's hell growing up in a dysfunctional family where his Da spends his time immersed in drink and abusing his Ma and the locals refer to the Brady family as "the pigs". Even Francie's only friend, Joe Purcell, starts to distance himself from Francie's growing "dark side" of violent behaviour, disregard for personal property and brooding grudges against one of the families in town.

Filled with a lot of dark humor, confusing leaps in mental focus and horrifying scenes of macabre, this is a disturbing read as Francie's world is filled with death and loss. Francie is viewed by his neighbors as not quite human, making Francie a social outcast and all alone with no support network to help him. McCabe has done an amazing job capturing Francie's mind as he slowly descends from a child relying on fantasy as a way to escape his dysfunctional and unloving world into one of genuine insanity as Francie lashes out at the world that has shunned him. The frustration Francie feels is palpable.

The New York Times Books Review called this one "Stunning... part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Hanibal Lecter." If you are like me, as you read this one, you will want to reach out and help Francie but at the same time, you will pull back scared to death to go near him for fear of what he might do. McCabe manages to present this dichotic image of Francie in believable terms and pulls it off with a skill that makes up for the struggles I had making sense of some of Francie's inner dialogue. While McCabe draws the reader completely inside Francie's mind, he still leaves open a window of awareness for what is going on outside of Francie's delusions and ignorance of reality as it unfolds around him.

As much as I am glad to have finally read this one, I am equally glad that it is now off my TBR pile and it can find a new home somewhere else. This one started to hit my boundaries for horror and morbidity and makes it a difficult one for me to recommend to anyone because of that. show less

Getting started with the book was a challenge. The stream of conscious, dialect, and unreliable narrator made for much initial confusion. But I started to work it all out and get used to it by about a quarter of the way in. It was worth the effort.

Francie is a very memorable character and being inside his head the entire book you really get to know him. By the end I just felt so sad for him. If I had read about his story in the news I would not have had much empathy. McCabe really makes it show more hit home what it might be like living with serious mental illness, no to mention the real life circumstances that make management and recovery nearly impossible. show less