Irish Fiction: While there is no doubt about Pat McCabe's dynamic, arresting imagination and ingenious prose, their appearance in his latest novel is patchy, and for all its colour, the lax construction hints at apathy, writes Eve Patten
Back in 1927, in his Aspects of the Novel lectures, E.M. Forster famously urged writers to develop "round" characters rather than "flat" ones. Along with a handful of like-minded novelists since then, Pat McCabe has successfully reversed that instruction and produced, with striking flatness, the comic-strip social grotesques who inhabit the paranoid Irish borderlands of his fictional territory.
These one-dimensional constructions are essential, of course, to what a reviewer once described as his characteristic "bog Gothic", where dysfunctional individuals appear as the scapegoats of national deformity. In his latest novel, McCabe presents narrator- protagonist Joey Tallon as the requisite Border psychobilly. With his proliferating schizoid and italicised verbal tics, his Travis Bickle obsession and his Beano-esque love-hate relationship with pies, Joey signals to the heart of an Irish midlands darkness. Another mother-fixated social orphan, he may have lost some of his novelty value in the wake of The Butcher Boy's Francie Brady, but he has gained symbolic significance through the familiarity of his alienation and vulnerability.
Joey's accidental witnessing of a murderous event outside his home town of Scotsfield draws in the backdrop of his shadowy environment. No-one has bettered McCabe in conveying the mondo bizarro condition of the Irish Border region, the volatile inter-zone between Northern anarchy and Southern insouciance. In Scotsfield - once again a clone of Clones - gombeenism gradually blends with Provo racketeering and, over the years, the hoods who run the local blue-movie den become a coercive midlands mafia, emerging as video rental kings, super-garage owners, and the dubious sponsors of the vast hotel that suddenly rears up amidst Kavanagh's black hills.
The local politics are well drawn but McCabe over-reaches himself in painting the cultural landscape of the Irish 1970s, in which the first half of the novel is set. The reconstruction of 1976 is like a bad compilation tape, spun out in Joey's trippy recollections of Black Sabbath, Bob Dylan and Santana, of reading Steppenwolf as his Bible and dropping tabs like Smarties. In The Dead School this era was aptly and economically conveyed in a brief hymn to Horslips: here, it reads as the victory of soundtrack over substance.
The heavy-handedness also distracts from the point - made again recently by John Kelly in his Border-town story, Sophisticated Boom-Boom - that popular music during this period was a means of bypassing the pressurised national narratives on offer, the battle of the bands blanking out, as it were, the Battle of the Boyne. McCabe's return to this material - a favourite patch - is legitimate but clogged. He seems uneasy, too, with his allusions, and sporadically adds explanatory tags to Joey's narrative, self- consciously sourcing the book's title to J.J. Cale or a much-used refrain to Joni Mitchell, then having to clarify that Barbapapa was a 1970s TV cartoon character and - with less necessity surely - Fianna Fáil a dodgy political party.
Just as cumbersome are the novel's ironic meta-textual gestures. Imprisoned after the inevitable "clown-versus-town" incident, Joey takes up creative writing at Mountjoy Gaol and turns his own disorder first into Beat performance poetry and then into a Cassavetes-style screenplay, in a series of frustrated attempts to represent the outrage he has witnessed.
While he struggles with the truth, others succeed in fabrications. Another writer steals his life experiences for a thriller, the local hoods force him to participate in a pornographic movie, and Bono, the supposed prophet of his generation, continues to ignore his efforts and his letters from the safe distance of U2's Miami recording studio. So, we learn, Ireland's real life is obscured by its bogus representations. But rather than leaving it at that, McCabe picks at the sore and turns on his own complicity, with flash-forwards to the unexpected success of Joey's novel, entitled Doughboy. Written at a furious pace, 10 hours a day, and celebrated by its credulous London publishers for its authentic vernacular and hilarious Celtic whimsy - sound familiar yet? - Doughboy, too, is shown up as a contrivance, a falsification of the lives of ordinary people. Ah, a clever intertextual postmodern autobiographical conceit. Or is it an accidental trip across the line from ironic self-reference into disingenuous self-importance?
The several violent episodes which catalyse this novel, framed in McCabe's trademark dark cinematic slapstick, are individually mesmerising. But elsewhere, Call Me the Breeze is desultory and repetitive. Free-form to the point of formlessness, it lacks a convincing structural design and collapses. The descriptions of Joey's fantastic and unlikely film projects are tedious, the cultural and political references tokenistic, and by the time the unhinged protagonist quotes Michael Longley's poem, 'Ceasefire', at his implausibly compliant community college students, the enigma of what he does and says is lost.
As with its predecessor, Emerald Germs of Ireland, the reader tires of McCabe's artful codology and the effort of distinguishing reality from psychotic fantasy, longing only for the redemption of a tight finish and suffering instead a slow, awkward landing.
Do we, perhaps, suspect a weariness behind the work? In the past, McCabe's fiction has harnessed a huge creative energy through the narrative fusion of transatlantic gonzo and domestic vernacular, stamped irreverently on the Irish staples of claustrophobia, mental illness and violence. This book builds on the same props but seems so bloated by them that it reads as the self- conscious exhaustion of a once-fertile mode. There is not the least doubt about the author's dynamic, arresting imagination and ingenious prose, but their appearance here is patchy, and for all its colour, the lax construction of his latest novel hints at apathy.
Eve Patten is a lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin
Call Me the Breeze. By Patrick McCabe, Faber, 337pp, £16.99