The Butcher Boy

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 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 show more 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

"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 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 show more 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 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.

"All the beautiful things in this world are lies. They count for nothing in the end."

Set in a small town in the early 1960's Ireland 'The Butcher Boy' is a hybrid of first-person narrative and stream of consciousness told by Francis 'Francie' Brady, also known as the 'pig boy'.

We first meet Francie hiding out "in hole under a tangle of briars" whilst being hunted by the police "on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent." It is only much later that we learn what his actual crime was.

The only child of an alcoholic father and a mother driven mad by despair, as his troubled home life collapses Francie retreats into a fantasy world. Sexually abused whilst at a Catholic reform school, ridiculed by his neighbour Mrs. Nugent, when he is dropped show more by his best friend Joe Purcell who has outgrown their boyhood mischief in favour of Mrs. Nugent’s son, Philip, Francie finally finds a target for his twisted rage. This novel chronicles 'the pig boy’s' chilling loss of innocence and descent into tragedy and madness.

Written in the regional vernacular it initially takes a bit of getting used to but once I did I found its rhythm strangely compelling that seemed to match Francie's deteriorating mental state really well. My feelings towards Francie were constantly shifting; at times I pitied him, at times I despaired of him and would have liked to have got my own hands upon him. One New York Times critic described the book as “part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Hannibal Lecter” and its hard to disagree with that assessment. This novel is certainly dark but there are also touches of humour. I cannot say in truth that I actually enjoyed it but that may have something to do with the subject matter, however I still found it a remarkable piece of writing that is likely to live in the memory. show less

One of the best books I’ve ever picked up. Francie Brady has definitely made my list of favorite characters and he is a character that will stick with me. It was whimsically dark and humorous in the most inappropriate parts, and I couldn’t help but root for Francie, the somewhat villain of his own story, who’s biggest victim is himself.

I had seen the movie version of this book before reading it. And although I don't remember the movie entirely, it did prepare me for some of what to expect. I imagine going into this one cold would be a bit of a wild ride.

We're thrust into the mind of Francie Brady, a young Irish boy who lives in a troubled home. In short order, we start to realize that Francie himself is a bit troubled. I feel like this book defies description or pinning down. It is sometimes horrifying, sometimes funny, often confusing. Francie's view of things is often unreliable, and his disordered mind isn't the easiest to spend time in. But the book manages to dance enough on the edges that it pulls you back in just when you think things are going to become show more completely unbearable. Still, it's not a book for the genteel crowd.

Recommended for: fans of Requiem for a Dream, A Clockwork Orange, people who like their humor black.

Quote: "I says I will ma and she says I know you will son and then we'd just sit for hours sometimes just staring into the firegate only there never was a fire ma never bothered to light one and I wasn't sure how to go about it. I said what fire do we want its just as good sitting here staring into the ashes." show less

Can children be evil? In literature this is certainly the case. I am reminded of the evil little girl, Rhoda Penmark, in The Bad Seed by William March. In Patrick McCabe's third novel we have a rival for Rhoda with Francie Brady. It is a journey into the heart of darkness: the mind of a desperately troubled kid one step away from madness and murder. Francie Brady is a schoolboy in a small town in Ireland. His father is a mean drunk and his mother a slovenly housekeeper, but Francie has a good buddy, Joe Purcell, and their Tom-and-Huck friendship is what sustains him. Then a seemingly trivial incident alters the landscape: Francie and Joe con the very proper Philip Nugent out of his prize collection of comic books, and Philip's mother show more calls the Bradys ``pigs.''
Like many of Edgar Allan Poe's narrators, Francie will blame all his troubles on someone else, in his case Mrs. Nugent; it doesn't help that the Nugent household is a cozy haven, maddeningly out of his reach. Matters rapidly deteriorate. His mother enters a mental hospital. Francie runs away to Dublin; he returns to find that his ma, whom he had promised never to let down, has drowned herself. He breaks into the Nugents' house, defecates on the carpet, is sent to reform school, and (the unkindest cut) loses Joe to Philip Nugent. Francie tells us all of this in a voice that is the novel's greatest triumph--a minimally punctuated but always intelligible flow of razor-sharp impressions, name-calling, self-loathing, pop-culture detritus culled from comic books and John Wayne movies (the time is 1962), all delivered with the assurance of a stand-up comic.
We see in this story the longing for childhood innocence, now lost forever, and just an inkling of the gathering mental darkness that will lead to an inevitable denouement. Reminiscent of Salinger and Sillitoe, McCabe has created something all his own--an uncompromisingly bleak vision of a child who retains the pathos of a grubby urchin even as he evolves into a monster not unlike some of those that issue from Poe's imagination. His novel is a tour de force. show less