McCabe is an Irish writer of mostly dark and violent novels of contemporary, often small-town, Ireland. His books can be read as a plea for a pluralistic Irish culture that can encompass the past without being dominated by it. His prose has a vitality and an anti-authoritarian bent, using everyday language to deconstruct the ideologies at work in Ireland between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. McCabe's strength as an author lies in his ability to probe behind the veneer of respectability and conformity to reveal the brutality and the cloying and corrupting stagnation of Irish small-town life, but he is able to find compassion for the subjects of his fiction. Patrick McCabe came to prominence with the publication of his third adult novel, The Butcher Boy, in 1992 the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Britain and won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize for fiction. Poguemahone is a wild, free-verse monologue, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.

How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts who eat away at the sanity of all who live there.Īnd, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister. How a young and overweight Una finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England.

From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate.

Pogue mahone patrick mccabe