The Holy City By Patrick McCabe Bloomsbury, 210pp. £12.99 SINCE HIS GROUNDBREAKING third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), Patrick McCabe's singular rendition of psychological disturbance and sociopathic behaviour in small-town Ireland has made him the country's pre-eminent postmodern seanchaí, writes Liam Harte
If the writer's truths are told slant, then McCabe's are bent at a freakish angle. In his portrayal of manic, demented and drug-fuelled states, McCabe merges autobiography, allegory, satire and fantasy to produce outlandish, tragicomic tales of Irish dysfunction - which are also fables of the human condition - that burrow deep into the imagination. Nowhere else in contemporary Irish fiction do we find loneliness, abuse, neglect, prejudice and paranoid delusion narrated with such heightened emotion, or witness the residual effects of colonialism and repression laid bare with such cartoon-like exhilaration.
Drawing on cinematic and comic-strip techniques, McCabe dramatises the psychic and cultural effects of living on a divided island where historical trauma goes unacknowledged, deeds don't match words and brutal truths are hidden behind cliché and weepy nostalgia. His is an Ireland that compounded its failure to confront the legacies of its colonial past by perpetuating an impossibly idealised version of itself, one that abhorred the messy ambiguities of modernity.
This helps explain why so few McCabe protagonists are comfortable in their own skin. A toxic mixture of suppressed memory and feverish self-loathing makes them pathetically susceptible to the blandishments of otherness, especially the glamour of celebrity, which holds a mirror up to the vacuity of their own lives. There is no still point of belonging in McCabe's fictional universe, only an echoing metaphysical vacancy where a stable identity should be.
AT THE LEVEL of plot, some of the most alarming cases of psychotic behaviour stem from the failure of love and the insecurities it exposes. As readers, we quickly learn that virtually every evocation of bliss in a McCabe novel is merely the overture to an unnerving recital of the nightmarish effects of rejection, betrayal and deceit.
McCabe returns obsessively to these themes, most recently in Winterwood(2006) - his best novel since The Dead School(1995) - in which the clue to Ned Strange's homicidal derangement lies in his eerily blasé remarks about how "the heart's enchantment" always turns to ashes.
Christopher ("just call me Pops") McCool travels a similar journey from apparent contentment to ruinous abandonment in The Holy City. When we first meet this "retired swinger" and former country eggman, he is living in the "Happy Club" in Cullymore with his young Croatian girlfriend, Vesna, to whom he is inordinately devoted. But no sooner has he eulogised love as "the most sacred place on Jesus God's green earth" than he bemoans Vesna's infidelity.
As usual in McCabe, McCool is the most unreliable of narrators, so we must infer Vesna's subsequent fate, and that of many other alleged betrayers, from his expressions of remorse for succumbing to the "excitable passions" that led to his psychiatric detention - a shuddersome detail that colours our reception of his exploits as an aspiring 1960s "cool cat".
Passionate emotion is one of the qualities McCool associates with Catholics, whom his haughty Protestant father, Henry Thornton, taught him to regard as degenerate inferiors. Behind such sectarian thinking lies the primal act of betrayal that made Chris McCool "a half-Protestant bastard": the "vile congress" between Lady Thornton and Stan Carberry, a Catholic. With obvious symbolic relevance to post-partition Ireland, McCool is tortured by the conflicting pulls of his mixed pedigree and driven to fixate on exotic others in the hope that they might appease his anguished yearnings.
Back in 1969, the object of McCool's most ardent desire was young Marcus Otoyo, Cullymore's only black resident, whose "morally dubious" parentage echoed his own. McCool mythologised Marcus as the embodiment of Catholic piety, believing that "in his image and likeness, I would secure the adoration and respect I had so long been denied".
However, his fantasies of spiritual union with this Martin de Porres lookalike were clouded by his suspicions that Marcus had fallen under the sexual spell of Dolly McCausland, McCool's then girlfriend. Unmanned by this imagined deceit, McCool sees the walls of love's holy city breached, just as they were at the moment of his conception. And as in Othello, when love and trust are sullied, chaos is come again.
Like so many of his fictional forebears, McCool lives within the sway of a mythology conjured up for him by films, music and advertisements. The early chapters in particular are so saturated with slogans, refrains and jingles that the narrator seems little more than a figment of consumer capitalism. McCabe's protagonists always test the limits of empathy and credibility, but his most engaging creations - Francie Brady, Raphael Bell, Redmond Hatch - retain their plausibility as damaged individuals even when they mutate into objective correlatives for the society that spawned them. Such plausibility is indeed central to these characters' memorableness, and to the novels' critique of society's culpability for the plight of its most vulnerable and alienated citizens.
In The Holy City, however, McCabe has fashioned a protagonist who excites little imaginative sympathy, being primarily an instrument of satire and social commentary. Certainly, McCool's evolution from "perfect avatar" of sixties ephemerality to "drained and grateful cipher" of 21st-century apathy focuses the reader's judgement of an Ireland of glitzy affluence and moral anaesthesia. But even as we appreciate the aptness of having a voice emptied of emotion evoke the soullessness of contemporary life, we are left with the difficulty of locating the novel's emotional core.
McCool's one-dimensionality means that his relentless chattiness tests our patience, and the low-voltage tension of his skewed monologue dissipates the novel's dramatic impact. So, much as we may relish the mordant satire of The Holy City, McCabe's absurdist vision here lacks that combination of humane feeling and queasy edginess that characterises his most engrossing work.
Liam Harte teaches Irish and Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. His book, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001, will be published shortly by Palgrave Macmillan