Book Review: Pat McCabe's love letter to the underbelly of early '70s London
Pat McCabe: Author of ‘The Butcher Boy’ has created a vast world in his latest novel, ‘Poguemahone’.
- Poguemahone
- Patrick McCabe
- Unbound €20 hb
This is a great enormous book by a great Irish author and should be welcomed by everyone in this great country and the world beyond. 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.
Yes, it is a verse novel rather than the usual prose offering, but who would know that if they were, sensibly, listening to it being delivered in the mellifluous timbre of Patrick McCabe, its author, who can do all the voices.
What fun and what a joy to find that vital, energetic tone of the narrator in The Butcher Boy, here lent to Dan Fogarty and his band of intimates. Hailing from Currabawn, Dan ends up in Killiburn, London home of so many exiles from his own country.
His sister, mother and auntie are also knocking about London, frequenting the hotspots of Piccadilly and Soho. Frequenting, that is, not as visitors but as workers, on display for anyone with the ready cash for a good night out – or just that single pint, cradled in sweaty palms for going on an hour of an evening.
Dan’s sister, Una, is not what she was, and he has her stashed in a nursing home in Margate. Safely havened under its roof, the siblings reminisce, sharing stories which go right back to the Blitz in London’s East End. Una may not be able to remember what she had for breakfast but the life she is living is vivid, set in the past maybe but, for her, in an embellished present.
Back in Currabawn ‘with its streams and mountains and humble stone cabins’ there were not that many skinheads around but, almost as soon as he arrived in London, Dan met one near John Lewis in Oxford Street.
This person, one Skinny Mr Skinhead, was not too keen on Dan, aka Mr Turf-Ears, and he biffs him about a bit. That is until, having taken refuge under a skip, Dan arises and gives ‘Lord Hooligan of Hooligan’ a taste of his own medicine, with a ‘ker-clunk’ or two.
Poguemahone is a love song to the underbelly of London in the early 1970s with Brendan Behan newly dead, and fondly remembered for ‘pissing in the fish tank’.
Everyone is watching and rewatching The Exorcist and listening to ‘Tubular Bells’ and life is edgy and urban with band members and actors dropping into Nano’s club under Piccadilly Circus and no one has time to go to bed or work.
Nostalgia for a simpler life in Cork or Tipperary weaves through the narrative but the passion is for the dark, dangerous, deep caverns of the city.
Nowadays, through television and social media, or Ryanair flights to gigs and shows, everyone can share in the excitements of London but, back then, there was an unbridgeable chasm between the rural, god-fearing, net-curtain twitching Irish and the mind-your-own-business, anything-goes attitude of those immersed in the sleazy West End nightlife.
And yet, in Poguemahone, McCabe links, through the Fogarty family, the two worlds, reimagining and recreating, in the most colourful manner, that period of time on both sides of the water.
In some ways Poguemahone is similar to Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves in that it reminds us of a time, in recent history, when Ireland was a very different country from what it is now, and when those who could not belong in that country left for a life in England, a life which would have been abhorrent to those who stayed behind on their conservative island.
