Pat McCabe’s surreal stories are the real thing

IN HIS 1967 book, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, the late Scottish psychiatrist, RD Laing, eloquently expressed the irony of normality.

“‘Normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience... the ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane.

“Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labelled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”

Before you indulge in the wacky, fictional world of Patrick McCabe, pay attention to these very sensible words. The Monaghan-born writer’s 13th book, Hello and Goodbye, contains two slim gothic novels.

The first of these, Hello Mr Bones, is an eerie tale of revenge retold by the ghost of an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Balthazar Bowen.

Goodbye Mr Rat — the concluding novel — is posthumously narrated by an ex-IRA activist, Gabriel King, who has died from cancer.

He describes a journey back from America to his resting place in a small village in Ireland.

Here, he witnesses his own mock funeral, a torrent of drunken abuse from his old Republican comrades. The book moves between despairing hilarity to disturbing evil.

I sense McCabe mistrusts culture hacks who deconstruct the beauty of art by asking unnecessary questions.

“All I ever try to do in my writing is to get to the truth of human nature. Whether it seems normal or eccentric is really for the reader to decide. But I would never describe any of the characters that I have written as mad,” McCabe says.

“Normality is a moveable feast, depending on so many different factors,” he says, sitting behind a small desk in his house in Dublin.

“In fact, I don’t know what normal is: it changes from decade to decade, and from epoch to epoch. Jimmy Savile was normal in my time, and he doesn’t seem normal now.

“And it’s not just because of the evidence of abuse that has come out. If you look back at the videos of Top of the Pops, and see what he is doing on them, nobody saw [his wrongdoings] then.”

Britain’s most notorious child abuser of the last 40 years has been mentioned because I have just asked McCabe if he ever feels disturbed — as an artist — by the dark sediment that he wades through, when he is digging for stories.

I point to one such tale in Hello Mr Bones: a character called Christine Taylor thinks back to her childhood, when her father sexually abused her. The abuse is only implied, with a mischievous menace, by the evil narrator.

McCabe explains how life began to imitate art in his work some years ago. “I used to think that my own writing was shocking. But when all these stories started to appear [about priests and child abuse] in the newspapers, around the time of Father Brendan Smith’s death, in 1997, it opened the floodgates. Everybody knew it was going on, anyway.

“But when I initially started writing, people would have thought that I was being gratuitous or something. Now, the stories have become banal. That is what is so shocking.

“But if you are going to be a serious writer, you can’t afford to be shocked. You have to be quite dispassionate about what you write.”

Look at McCabe’s career and common themes emerge: the stories are usually based in a small Irish town, and the characters tend to be sociopaths with a penchant for violence and murder.

In Emerald Gems of Ireland, Pat is a serial killer; in the awardwinning Winterwood, the devil is everywhere; and in McCabe’s last novel, The Stray Sod Country, Satan is the narrator.

But it’s the folklore and mythology embedded in these tales, rather than a belief in the old-fashioned Christian concept of good versus evil, that draws McCabe to write about such matters, he says.

“If there really was a devil, it would be great, because it would make things easier. Evil is a very handy concept. But, mostly, it’s just a case of weak human beings in a world they cannot understand.

“It would be far easier to rationalise things if you had a kind of Manichean concept of light and dark. But the older I get, the more I realise that most things are just random. And the world is a kind of cosmic burlesque,” McCabe says.

This striking image could also be used to describe the final pages of Goodbye Mr Rat: where McCabe’s deceased narrator recalls his own ashes being stamped into the carpet of the local pub. Chaos then ensues.

Here is just a small flavour: “Big Ulick, his tears dried at last, was lying prostate underneath the belly of the mechanical bull. As Walter Reilly turned around in circles, chuckling hysterically but making no sense, Congressmen Brewster was trying on a sombrero. As Beni, entirely naked, cried out gaily from the top of the counter.”

Many of McCabe’s dark, gothic tales descend into the surreal, as the story evaporates into a farce. It’s a style he inherited from his cultural heroes.

He names James Joyce, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock as the most influential of these. Perhaps because all of them tend to shy away — most of the time — from straightforward, linear plot lines based in the ‘real’ world.

“It was one of the French filmmakers who said that reality without imagination — in other words, realism or the naturalistic strain of writing — only tells 10% or 20% of the story,” says McCabe.

“Most people are only living within their own sealed kingdoms and privacies that you never get to see. And social realism will only document what is on the exterior, and let you go in a little bit. [In my own writing] there are duel identities, split personalities, things not being what they seem, as well as language meaning a whole load of different things at once.”

McCabe was born in the border town of Clones, Co Monaghan, in 1955. The house he grew up in was unusually literary and musical for its time.

His father was an extremely well-read man, and a fine musician who played in a brass band. And his mother was a great storyteller, as were most of the locals whom he’d meet on his way down to the shop or post office.

“A lot of the people that I knew in those days were good storytellers. It was an oral culture. Between seven and 10 years of age, I would have soaked up the folklore of the place I grew up in. And this was when modernity was just encroaching upon the community, having remained the same for the previous 100 years.”

Just 35 minutes have passed and McCabe has answered 20 questions without pausing. He is concise, direct, and gets straight to the point without a need for complicated anecdotes or strange diversions. A stark comparison, so, to the chaotic fictional universe where he spends most of his working day.

The more I talk with McCabe today, the more it seems as if his blunt manner is concerned with making sure there is a consistency, purity, and even respectfulness when speaking about his art.

Just ask him why he bothers writing, and he backs up this claim with an aura of pride and prestige.

“Writing is pretty much part of my nature, I would never examine why I was a writer anymore than a guitarist would say: ‘what am I holding this piece of wood for’? It’s as natural as breathing for me. It always has been,” McCabe says.

Hello and Goodbye is now available from Quercus Books.