Poguemahone

A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger— and more sinister.A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabe’s epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one family’s history—and the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate.

John Williams, New York Times

Praise for Poguemahone"Poguemahone is like a high dive: The toughest part of reading it might be convincing your feet to leave the board. Once you’ve done that, gravity does the rest."

Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Poguemahone [is] an immense, audacious novel [...] a volcanic spray of vernacular, Gaelic-infused memory fragments and character sketches."

The Guardian

"If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further than Patrick McCabe’s Poguemahone."

David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

"Poguemahone is, in content and execution, frequently astonishing, and galloping through a very long novel at the rate of three pages per minute is an exhilarating sensory experience. [...] In its haunting strangeness and blazing originality, [Poguemahone] deserves far more than a cult following."

Publishers Weekly

"McCabe draws the reader into a rambling web replete with Gaelic folklore, IRA agitation, and a soundtrack of glam and progressive rock. Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe’s career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma."

by turns achingly poetic, knowingly philosophical, and bitterly funny.”

“The vernacular, drunken verse format may be daunting at first, but after a few pages the narrative develops a hypnotic rhythm, as if one is sitting on a barstool listening to the narrator unspool his story over a pint (or three). At this point, the reader has merely to hang on and enjoy the ride. A moving saga of youth, age, and memory

not that the book isn’t a tremendous pleasure to read, albeit at times slightly uncomfortable. ‘Our national epic has yet to be written,’ all the young literary dudes opine in Ulysses. Poguemahone isn’t ‘about’ Ireland (though it is profoundly ‘about’ the Irish diaspora). But it is a particularly modern kind of epic"

"McCabe is attempting something different from the finely tuned gothic chamber music of his earlier work: he’s aiming for a kind of polyphony [...] the effect is one of alienation

Ian Mond, Locus

"Poguemahone is a stunning novel, one of those exceedingly rare books that deserve to be described as a masterpiece."

Paul Perry, The Independent (Ireland)"You might think, on first sight, that Poguemahone was following in the wake of Finnegan in its attempt to be enormously long, very dense and quite inaccessible. But it is not, at all. You can slip into it like a blunt knife through butter."

"Poguemahone is a shape-shifting epic of the Irish in England, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale McCabe has never attempted before. Indeed, among his 14 novels and two Booker Prize nominations, this stands out as risky, experimental work by an artist reluctant to rest on his laurels. Modernist and eager to push the boundaries of his own art and the art form of the novel, here is a novelist and novel to celebrate in all their ribald, audacious, outrageous, and compelling brilliance."

The Telegraph

"The reader hears the book as something spoken aloud, or whispered, or snarled, or insinuated or spat into his ear. The voice is an insistent companion who, having got hold of an elbow, has no plans to stop until his hour is exhausted or the auditor collapses under the weight of memory, bile, repetition and implication."

The Daily Mail

"No one who read McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy could forget its chilling depiction of a troubled schoolboy in 1960s Ireland. His latest, a dizzying verse novel 600 pages long, is equally likely to haunt the mind. It has so many layers that we’re never sure where we are ... with a skinpricking ambience that’s both gritty and ethereal."

Ian Duhig, The Guardian

"McCabe may be right when he claims that Poguemahone is his best book: it is startlingly original, moving, funny, frightening and beautiful."

a hefty 600 pages

"The book

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“McCabe [is] as skilled and significant a novelist as Ireland has produced in decades.”

New York Times

“Lyrical and disturbing, horrific and hilarious.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“[McCabe is] one of the most brilliant writers ever to come out of Ireland.”

New York Times Book Review

“Breakfast on Pluto may be the most successful book yet to be born out of the violence [in Northern Ireland] … Stunning originality.”

Los Angeles Times

“A spellbinding story of betrayal and broken dreams narrated to a wonderfully menacing effect … the sheer force of his language … positively thrums with life.”

Seattle Times

“The Dead School makes compelling literature … The writing is seamless, the effect shocking: Imagine Apocalypse Now cheerfully narrated by Jimmy Stewart.”

Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

“Reading fiction will never be the same again.”

Hermione Lee, author of Tom Stoppard: A Life

“A dark genius of incongruity and the grotesque.”

Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

“A sustained achievement of often dazzling brilliance.”

Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane

“Gloriously deranged, wired to the moon, truly inspired.”

From the Back Cover

So here I am,mused Dan Fogartyto himself,in the place all alongwhere I was meant to bewith me travelling,surely,for a long time,done& all me efforts now concentratedon keeping on my kith & kin&,in the process,ensuringtheir good namenever again,in my presence,is slighted.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Now, that put the fear of God in me when I heard it, I don’t mind telling you, Paddy Conway continued, and he fiercely fretful, rubbing the palms of his hands in a parallel motion up and down the length of his off-white apron, & the reason for that is, more than most I know it to be a song unique to the craythur that is known, in folklore, as the gruagach. I’m not telling you a word of a lie they can just as suddenly fling a crock of fire water into your face, aye and scorn you as they’re doing it again. & then when you look, sight nor sign of him will there to be seen. It is often remarked that there is another even more wicked side to the breed, a fondness for abducting innocent human childre, preferably unbaptised. It is often expected that he arrives in a gust of wind some night when you least expect him & that what you’ll be looking upon is an ugly wee runt of a man in a skirty coat aye, a coarse runty fellow & he burned up by the sun wearing a pair of old brogues that no tinker would be seen in. With not so much as even a hint of malice initially. But, make no mistake, that will come later. & he indulging himself in the pelting of innocent individuals with stones and rocks, or causing burning peats to fall from the fireplace, injuring both humans and animals. Aye, and singing no end of bawdy songs, or disclosing scandalous things concerning visitors to the house, from secret locations around the rooms – the chimney, maybe, or the ceiling. They could even break windows and cause apparitions to appear – invade people’s privacy as they lay there asleep – perhaps even cause their beds to levitate alarmingly. As could Dan The Blackbird by times all got up in his Sunday morning best a dickybow, even. & he, all the while underneath, like some shadow with no face a repugnant entity in a cowled jerkin, with sharp fang-like teeth, through which he spits brazenly, scorned crumbs of The Sacred Host. Paddy Conway seemed pale, and for a bit it looked as if he was on the point of abandoning the story. Before raising his hand and shuffling towards the washbasin in order to fill himself a glass of tap water, sighing protractedly as he downed it in one swift gulp. Before proceeding, as before. Then he comes, the barman resumed, aye back arrived Dan The Blackbird & started rambling and raving to himself about this and that, little of which I could make any sense of. Regarding the poor misunderstood gruagach, them that had the misfortune to be placed on earth against their will midway between Paradise and the Infernal Regions at every turn to be low-rated, slurred & slighted never to know any proper home, reviled in the body of a threeyear- old child, only with the face of a three-hundred-yearold man. Whose only distinguishment in this world is the quality of malevolence, when they’re not invading innocent people’s dreams for that they will do & make no mistake & turn milk sour overnight, prevent hens from laying, inflict terribly incurable diseases upon households, make cattle fall ill & sheep break out of their pens.

About the Author

Patrick McCabe was born in 1955 in Clones, Country Monaghan. He was a teacher and then he was not, having become a full-time writer. He is the author of, among other novels, The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into feature films by Neil Jordan.

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