Irish writer Patrick McCabe must now be described as a hit-and-miss novelist, as must many very good writers. He's had a few big hits: The Butcher Boy, The Dead School, and Breakfast on Pluto. The first and third were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But The Dead School is his most ambitious and successful work, the one that signalled here is a young Irish novelist to carry on in the contemporary tradition of Flann O'Brien, John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, John Banville-writing the real black Irish stuff, as opposed to the unreal Disneyfied thing produced by the likes of Maeve Binchy, the nodding Roddy Doyle (who's recently gone on record saying that Ulysses is not all that hot), and the stagy American Irishism of Frank McCourt (himself his own worst fiction). But something has gone wrong in McCabe's novels. It began with Breakfast on Pluto (so a hit and a miss?), was more troubling in Emerald Germs of Ireland, and now with Call Me the Breeze this wrong-headedness has mis-led McCabe some leagues from the rails.
It's not simply that he began to repeat himself with Emerald Germs. Many very good writers find their subject early and spend a lifetime performing variations on a theme. Of course, great novelists do not: for example, Philip Roth doesn't, nor does Martin Amis; and the greatest writers-Shakespeare, James Joyce-could not. The recognition of repetition with variation, of meaningful pattern, in the novels of a favourite writer can be a readerly pleasure: say, watching a good minor novelist such as Brian Moore tangle obsessively and inventively with faith and doubt and guilt; or smiling and laughing as Mordecai Richler again makes comic art of his outrage and humane resentments. The problem arises when repetition is to no discernible purpose other than its own vertiginous whirling. An absurdist or little postmodernist derides the reader's search for meaning. But it's unlikely that such a critic would make her nihilistic point at a repetitive 300+ pages. If she did, I would sentence her to solitary in an oubliette with Call Me the Breeze for company. She might even enjoy it.
Call Me the Breeze reads as if one of those multitudinous novels that Joyce said gets written daily in the craiking pubs of Dublin finally got published (here by HarperCollins, in the UK by Faber and Faber). Remarkably, Breeze has garnered mixed reviews, of the sort where the reviewer either likes the novel or not, with no middle ground. But this reviewer cannot imagine a discerning reader who would not come early to the conclusion that the novel's first-person narrator, the always consciousness-altered Joey Tallon, simply carries on for far too long in a voice that bespeaks a mind more thoroughly corrupted by the self-affirming bromides of New Ageism from the 1970s to the present. McCabe created his narrator to self-present this way on purpose, of course, and McCabe is a very skilled writer (so there is always that not inconsiderable pleasure). Regardless, I think Call Me the Breeze is seriously flawed, and the fault begins (as it does most often) with a bad choice.
Why McCabe chose to hang the whole works on one of the dumbest characters I've encountered in fiction is bewildering. Joey Tallon may be the dumbest character (is that also an achievement from which the reader can take pleasure?), because offhand I cannot think of his equal. Slow as a lava lamp, always stoned out of his head, blubbering his charlatan mystic self-help platitudes, waving his repetitive references to the same two or three esteemed writers, and to cinema, songs, TV: that, and a whole lot more that is less, is Joey Tallon. His most meaningfully real' relationship being with an inflatable doll, Joey's whole life is something of a painful fantasy. Bad choice, Mr. McCabe. Your ear-bending narrator is repulsive, and he's fairly representative of the novel's bad lot of characters.
A fan and promoter of McCabe's writing, I eagerly agreed to review this latest novel. At page 100, with two-thirds of the way to go, reading became like watching a pig-headed friend stumble drunkenly into acres of parking lot, his tinkling keys repeatedly dropping in tiny clanging alarm. I kept glancing in growing dismay at the thickness of book remaining, wanting Joey Tallon to stop, for his sake and his author's as much as for mine-for God's sake, shut up!-disbelieving that McCabe could take the story and narrator anywhere else that would prove remotely interesting. And yet he forged on, failing to transform Joey Tallon's insipid logorrhea into literary art. A breezy tale told by a charming idiot Breeze is not. Joey's voice quickly becomes grating; his self-regarding long-windedness reminded me of speeding friends from the 1970s who talked like they'd just discovered consciousness. Some sentences are ungrammatical to no apparent purpose, or they're so poorly constructed as to resist intelligibility no matter how many times I tried to follow their unparalleled-indeed Italian pretzel-like-twists. That's Joey's voice'. The intrusive typographical bells and whistles-reams of eye-wearying italic and bolts of bold, pages in typewriter style and cursive-instead of relieving the vocal tedium, reveal only that McCabe had a working word processor with him in his Sligo home. What he needed was an editor with integrity.
All of this failure of style is for the sole purpose of Joey Tallon's telling yet another McCab(r)e story of a demented consciousness; the booze and drugs merely exacerbate, retarding rather than hurrying along, the narrated delusions of grandeur. McCabe is indeed the bard of contemporary Irish dementia. Butcher Boy, utilizing the same setting and similar theme, was an affecting story that had to be told, and McCabe did so originally and brilliantly in about half the length of Breeze. Breakfast on Pluto, also slim in size, was distinguished for taking a similar show on the road, as it were, to London. Then came Emerald Germs of Ireland, seemingly telling the story of an older Francie-type character from Butcher Boy. In memory, Germs is much longer than it actually is. And now the bloated Breeze plops onto the free end of the oeuvre seesaw, sending its younger siblings flying.
John Updike says somewhere that he would never make a stupid protagonist because stupidity is uninteresting fictionally. Joey Tallon, thy name is proof positive of Updike's principle. Joey is a supremely self-deluding, incredibly stupid slob who lives through the Troubles' troubling times in a suffocating Irish border town (probably based on Clones in County Monaghan, where McCabe was born). And Joey is most supremely the stupid author of his own troubles. There are of course some things to like in Call Me the Breeze: Bonehead the gypsy/tinker/traveller who goes ballistic whenever anyone observes that he is a gypsy (the family caravan home was for its vacation feel); someone else who is about to have "seven kinds of shite" kicked out of him (love those Irishisms). But I won't give more examples, because they do not excuse the monumental failure of this obviously big piece of work. At a third its length, Breeze might have constituted a tolerable variation on McCabe's obsession with life's losers, or at least an interesting five-fingered exercise in the obnoxious voice.
It pains me indeed to pan such a big piece of time-consuming work by a writer I'm always going on about to friends, colleagues, and students, but I cannot recommend Call Me the Breeze. Where were McCabe's editors at Faber and Faber? Why did HarperCollins Canada publish this book? It's hard to believe that an editor at HC read Breeze before buying the Canadian rights. McCabe remains an undeniably talented writer, still potentially in that intimidating line of great Irish writers from Sheridan and Swift to Trevor and Heaney, and I have faith that he will yet write the deserving successor to The Butcher Boy and The Dead School. In the meantime, read those earlier two novels, which are less expensively available in paperback.
In closing, it's awfully tempting to hand the editor of BiC a title for this review-"Call Me the Breeze Blows". There, like that other Irishman, I couldn't resist. With apologies to Patrick McCabe.