Poguemahone

March 28, 2022
Booker-shortlisted Irish writer McCabe (The Butcher Boy) unfurls a sprawling novel in free verse. Dan Fogarty is angry by nature and fiercely protective of his older sister, Una, 70, watching over her at the assisted care facility where she lives on the English coast. Dan spends much of the narrative recounting his family’s exile from Ireland in the 1950s and Una’s free-spirited life in the 1970s, when she moves into the “Mahavishnu Temple,” a flop house in South London that’s home to artists, drifters, and burnouts of all stripes. Orphaned early in life after the suicide of her disturbed mother, Una finds a new family in the Temple’s eccentrics: Troy McClory, a charming Scot and would-be poet who wins Una’s unwavering devotion; Tanith Kaplinski, an elegant, eccentric dancer; and Alex Gordon, the lecherous former British serviceman who maintains the property. Despite the free love and abundant substances, the Fogartys cannot escape the ill fortune that has followed their family since they were forced from the village of Currabawn. McCabe draws the reader into a rambling web replete with Gaelic folklore, IRA agitation, and a soundtrack of glam and progressive rock. Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe’s career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma.

April 15, 2022
A searing family drama and bittersweet evocation of nostalgia for lost youth. Irish novelist McCabe's new work is a leap beyond his previous accomplishments in fiction; a sprawling, epic novel in verse, the book builds on the tradition of lyric poetry as a method of storytelling, shot through with a postmodern Beat sensibility. The tale begins in the present as narrator Dan Fogarty arrives at the nursing home where his sister, the mercurial Una Fogarty, lives. From there, the narrative quickly moves back in time to the early 1970s to a communal house in London's Kilburn district, where the siblings spent their early adulthood among an endless parade of flatmates, besotted poets, and various other hippies and hangers-on. At the center of this bohemian gyre is the Scottish poet Troy McClory, and the anything-but-rosy romance between Troy and Una becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the story. Swirling around this torrid relationship, the book details the siblings' childhood during WWII and their coming-of-age against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, while the lingering specters of alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide are never far from the margins of the text. Despite these bleak themes, the novel is not without its share of humor--early '70s pop-culture references abound, and the Joycean linguistic play is a pleasure to read. Structurally, the book is a marvel; McCabe's inventive use of enjambment and stanza layout push the boundaries of what is possible in narrative storytelling. The vernacular, drunken verse format may be daunting at first, but after a few pages the narrative develops a hypnotic rhythm, as if one is sitting on a barstool listening to the narrator unspool his story over a pint (or three). At this point, the reader has merely to hang on and enjoy the ride. A moving saga of youth, age, and memory--by turns achingly poetic, knowingly philosophical, and bitterly funny.

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