My first intimation of Pat McCabe comes several hours before our interview, when Zoom tells me he is in the “meeting room”. I wonder does he have the time wrong, but no. It turns out he is simply checking everything is in order.
“I’ve had problems with these electronic things before, and you end up losing a lot of time. There’s an unnaturalness about it, and if it’s doubly complicated…”
Indeed. But it’s a hint of what I later discover – that McCabe is far from the kind of wild, chaotic character who appears in his books. Whether it’s Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy, Patrick Braden in Breakfast on Pluto, or indeed Dan Fogarty in his latest, Poguemahone, his characters have an anarchy and an unpredictability that veers between fascinating and alarming.
Pat himself, for all that he renders them so well, is not like that. When I say this to him, he immediately gets it.
“When I was younger, certainly in the ‘70s, the Bohemian ethic was very much a part of cultural life – ‘We’ll not do anything, we’ll just put on a little play over a pub in Notting Hill and somehow we’ll get by...’
"Well, you’ll get by until you’re 21 or 22 – and then you started to realise that all your friends that aren’t doing that are lawyers now or on their way to being CEO and you’re living in some dingy den talking about Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”
But back to Dan Fogarty and Poguemahone. The book – a hefty 600 pages – is written in verse form. And, for those of you put off by the very idea, don’t be. It is by turns energetic, hilarious, tragic and terrifying, and easy to follow once you fall into the beat of it – “the beat of a bodhran, which is the beat of Irish history,” says McCabe.
Set among the London-Irish of the explosive 1970s and a contemporary “now”, it has elements of Irish language and mythology, Catholicism, psychedelia, music, the supernatural – what McCabe calls “the kind of kaleidoscopic tornado of the ‘70s”.
Fogarty himself, our guide, changes as the book progresses, becoming first alarming, then unreliable, and finally sinister.
The book is, “a mystical kind of thing. It could be a complete and utter disaster," he says.
"I’ve had many of those disasters – and I don’t mean in terms of reception, I mean in terms of execution. That reach a dead end. Except that creatively you never reach a dead end and you never throw anything away.
"There are little snippets in this book, little phrases – I don’t mean chapters, I mean little locutions and combinations of words – that I maybe wrote 40 years ago.”
And yet, for all that, it is mystical.
“I don’t want to be obscure. That’s the last thing I want.”
“There was someone very close to me suffering from Alzheimer’s. And I’ve never experienced that before. I’ve experienced illness at close range but I’ve never ever experienced anything like this.
"And I won’t go into the details of it because it’s almost disrespectful. But I got to take it in over this long period.
"And in spite of the digital toys that we have now, in spite of current society placing man or woman at the centre of things and not needing God or not needing ritual – or thinking they don’t – we know no more now about either death or where people go, about the true nature of the mind, than primitive man or woman or the ancient Greeks did.
“So it came from that kind of thing, whereby you might as well apprehend something as horrendous as Alzheimer’s as a wicked spell, as the ancients did. So it became, on that level, some attempt to deal with this.
“Sometimes I don’t know myself what these books are about,” he says. “So it’s nice to be able to get a chance to sort of stand back from it and see, now that I’m just a bit distant from it.
"It’s an examination of the sort of elasticity and colour and the Baroque kind of playfulness, of Irish Catholic language and thinking, and the equally interesting but different, rational sturdy grammatical English view of the world.”
That said, he doesn’t for a second subscribe to the simplistic view that the Ireland of the time was a hopeless place.
“Everybody has this idea that it was backward and repressive. But that’s not what I’m suggesting here.
"Remember, we had a huge storytelling tradition. A sort of a rebel spirit. A very strong, anti-imperialist musical tradition. And all of that was equally important.”
Ruth Negga, Cillian Murphy and Stephen Rea in the background, in a scene from 2005's 'Breakfast on Pluto'
How did the book come to be written in verse form?
“I’ve a lot of friends who are poets, but I’ve never written a line of poetry in my life,” McCabe says. “And the main reason for that is that I’ve never felt I was any good at it.
"I’ve always felt poetry is about compression and brevity – and basically, from my earliest days as an aspirant writer, I couldn’t shut up. I was always drawn to dialogue and people’s voices and behaviour, rather than spiritual investigations of the natural world...”
He laughs. “I’m only being flippant. But the last thing on my mind when I started writing this was poetry and verse.”
And yet, verse is how it ended up – “closer to the hum of your mother singing when you’re young, to the beat of the bodhran, onto the sound of the psalms at Mass,” as he puts it.
"If writing is worth anything,” he insists, “if there’s something suggesting to you, it always comes from the subconscious, and you either follow it or you don’t, and that’s a decision every writer makes.”
The decision McCabe has made is that he will follow it, wherever it leads. Writing, for him, “is very much a kind of an emotional and a linguistic journey".
“I came more from a generation which really viewed writing as a sort of a calling, like a nun or a priest; a spiritual invocation of some kind, because it certainly made no sense financially.”
Really, I ask?
“None,” he says firmly.
And later, again on writing. “It would be easier not to, if you could manage it. It’s a very neurotic business.
"There were times when my children – my children are grown now and I’ve a couple of grandchildren and I’m not making the same mistake – but there were times when I was working on some accursed novel and they’d be out playing in the garden and I’d be sitting up in the study, agonising over some accursed comma.
"I look back and I say, you know... not that I neglected my children, I didn’t, but it would have been far more fun to be splashing around in a pool rather than stuck in a dark room.”
This is his 15th book, and he feels he’s getting closer to what he wants to achieve.
“Some of them were successful – I mean, in my terms. Not in the terms of reception, but in terms of what I was trying to find, and I think I’m only finding it now.
"I think the others are interesting in various different ways, but in terms... let me say, use the word purity... in the purity of language and the purity of intention. If you want to talk about the tribe you come from, all the experience you’ve had – the truth of it as you see it and a moral truth as well – I would say the others were just kind of preparatory attempts at finding this.”
This assessment includes The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as well as more recent and less lauded works.
“The Butcher Boy is a book written by a young man,” he says. “This is a book written by someone who has maybe acquired some small soupcon of wisdom, through suffering or through experience.
"The Butcher Boy is a bouncy, guerrilla, sparkly, happy-go-lucky book written by someone who is stunted in some ways, but brilliantly imaginative in other ways – but ultimately, it’s a teenage version or a childish version.
"This is not. He [meaning the writer of The Butcher Boy, as he was then] wouldn’t have had the humility, I think, or faith maybe, to finish something like this.”
Eamonn Owens as Francie, Andrew Fullerton as Phillip Nugent, and Fiona Shaw as Mrs Nugent in Neil Jordan's 1997 film of 'The Butcher Boy'
And yet when he did finish it, McCabe’s first thought was “well, that’s the end of it. I thought nobody would get it.”
He didn’t think he would be able to get the book published?
“In the current climate, you know, we’re surrounded by overworked publishers who are looking for a particular thing. And if you send them anything that is remotely what they would have called ‘experimental’ in the 1970s, they just almost weep – because they say, ‘Now I have to read this.’
"And then they tell you, ‘I can’t do anything with it.’ They don’t know how to find the audience.”
And so, believing this, he didn’t send it out by any of the traditional routes.
“I’m too old to be sitting there waiting, biting my fingernails, to be told what I knew it was gonna be...”
Instead, he went to John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound, a crowdfunded publishing company.
This model, he says, “is like putting on a play in your backyard. It’s got that kind of guerrilla cheek about it. The difference between Unbound and John Mitchinson, and putting on a play in your backyard with your friends, is that he’s a marketing genius. He used to be a marketing manager for Waterstones, so it’s a perfect alliance of art and commerce.”
“I sent him a note saying, ‘Look, I know this is probably going to be of no interest to you...’ And expecting that he’d send me, in about six months, a note saying, ‘I finally got around to reading your novel...’ because that is the usual experience for writers now.
"If you talk to even experienced people, they will tell you that a lot of the time they get ghosted.
"Instead he got back to me in three days. He said he’d read it from cover to cover and so did his wife, who ended up being the editor. And it’s not that they liked it or didn’t like it, what was important was they understood it. Anything I do is always going to divide people. It’s just the nature of it. But it didn’t divide them.”
Mitchinson said: ‘The readers are out there. We’ll find them.’ And they did. The book received over 500 pledges, ranging from to €15 to €1,400. The physical copy is handsome, with impressive production values.
The experience, McCabe says, has been “glorious, because first of all, you discovered a lot of people were interested in you and wanted to help you. And knew you were doing this for the right reasons.”
These ‘right reasons’ include, very much, saying to the “major corporations, ‘You no longer have the power over my imagination. I’m not at loggerheads with you, but you don’t own me and you’re not going to.’”
Is there a surge of energy that comes with that, I ask?
“Even better than the surge of energy is a quiet calm,” he says with a laugh.
Does he ever think about a kind of parallel universe in which he had continued to write fiction targeted towards a specific audience, captitalising on the success of The Butcher Boy, say, by trying to produce more in the same vein?
“Long, long before you were born, there used to be in Irish discourse something called a spoiled priest,” he says. “Did you ever hear of that?”
When I say I didn’t, he explains.
“A spoiled priest is the apple of his mother’s eye who goes off to Maynooth and is expected at the end of his seven years of study to come back home in triumph. Occasionally, the prospective clergyman would have a crisis of conscience. He’s no longer sure, for one reason or another, that he wants to be a priest. And he has to go to the bishop and say, ‘I haven’t got the faith anymore.’
"So he leaves. But then he has to come home to Mammy. And Mammy is heartbroken. He is a spoiled priest.
"If I had decided to write, say, the ‘Currabawn Conundrum’ – ‘smash bang, girl goes missing...’ – and made millions out of it, I would’ve felt like a spoiled writer. I would’ve committed a sin. By my lights.
"I might have been rich, but I always believed in the purity of the vocation.”
In any case, he adds, almost as an afterthought: “The Butcher Boy was a complete fluke. It just happened to come at the right time. It said things and in fact, was successful for reasons that I hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t even that interested in.
"It was perceived in some quarters, to suit a particular journalistic narrative, that here was someone attacking the church, smashing all these old icons. And if you actually look at it again, maybe investigate a little bit more closely, there’s very little of that is going on.
"There’s an awful lot of perplexity at the universe, of sadness at the way things have happened, and at how frail human beings are.
But this idea of it being a kind of punk demolition… I’m not like that by nature – and I wasn’t like that then and I never want to be like that, because I don’t like that youthful kind of arrogant energy.
"I was 37 when I wrote that book, and I had two small children.”
In any case, he had, he says, “made a decision long, long time before that, that anything that interfered with what it was that I wanted to do wasn’t going to be entertained. And if that happened to be success, which I suppose after a fashion it was – I wasn’t interested in it.”
And so we get this: Poguemahone – original, ambitious, occasionally tricky, utterly rewarding.
‘Poguemahone’ by Pat McCabe, published by Unbound, €17.99, is out now
