Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe, Picador, 228pp, £15.99 in UK
Meet transvestite rent boy Patrick "Pussy" Braden, of Tyreelin and Kilburn. His father is the local parish priest, whose wearing of surplices and soutanes was "partly responsible for his son's attraction to the airy apparel of the opposite sex".
Patrick never knew his mother, a teenager temporarily keeping house for the man of the cloth, but vividly imagines her in the Mitzi Gaynor role in South Pacific, washing that man right out of her head. He is reared, if that's the word, with a brood of anonymous illegitimates fostered by a boozy old dame he calls Whiskers. His best friend is a girl called Charlie. Tyreelin is a Provisionals' stronghold, but obviously that's not the only sense in which it is a border community.
At the recommendation of his psychiatrist, on whom he has a mad crush (as he has on just about any man), Patrick now breathlessly regales us with his life and times, true confessions of a career spent looking for love in all the wrong places. It's the 1970s. Matters have come to a head in the North. Glitter and glam are all the go in England - and Patrick's mention of the handbag-wielding wagon regularly impersonated by Dick Emery on his show brings to mind Danny LaRue and Dame Edna Everidge (the Seventies, golden age of drag?)
Put off not only by the short shrift Tyreelin gives his brazen cross-dressing but by his only friends there, Irwin and Charlie, gravitating towards the Pro visionals, Patrick makes for Piccadilly. Clients come thick and fast. Not only that; before long he's putting on a Dusty Springfield wig and belting out Son of a Preacher Man (what else?) in Kilburn pubs as though it's second nature to him, which of course it is; it's his first, as well.
To glitter and be gay - in the old sense, which Patrick also embodies, high as a kite on the energies of his fantasy life and on the unremitting emotional needs that drive it - is only the beginning, though. Patrick's brittle identity is constantly in danger, beset by his attitude to his origins, by being Irish when the IRA bomb English pubs, by being unwanted, to put it mildly, in his native place.
The thin ice of street life, which he manages to skate over deftly enough, covers an abyss of malevolence, cruelty and betrayal, into which he inevitably slithers time after time, culminating in his predictably disastrous return to Tyreelin. Unable to rise above Irish "politics" or English "culture" (in the world of this novel everything is inverted), Patrick nevertheless continues to aspire to the out-of-this-world bliss of hearth and home suggested by the title, the impossible yet mundane romance of which is underlined by a note saying that Don Partridge had a hit in 1969 with a song of the same name.
Distressing and hilarious, satirical and bathetic, over the top and understated, Breakfast on Pluto conveys in the manner of Roy Lichtenstein matter that wouldn't be out of place in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Patrick Mc Cabe has ventured once again into transgressive territory, charting in a deceptively throwaway, highly nuanced manner an orphaned consciousness saturating itself with the slurry of international pop culture as an antidote to lethal local conditions.
Some of the liberties taken here with such formal staples of the novel as tone, point of view and character development, may leave some readers more shaken than stirred. But these too, together with the idea of Pussy Braden in the first place and his explosively deleterious circumstances, ultimately confirm Patrick McCabe as one of the more challenging and intriguing imaginations in Irish fiction today.
George O'Brien wrote the Introduction and Notes to the recently- published The Ireland Anthology