Patrick McCabe's not inconsiderable gift is the ability to capture and create individual voices that act as a guide and filter to a world made fantastic by the author's wonderfully wicked vision. His novels and short stories playfully interweave gloriously trashy literary, musical and cinematic references with confidence and ease. McCabe demonstrates that despite the manic undercurrent running through most of his writing, he is aware of a reality of modern living: of being bombarded and shaped by a variety of texts and stimuli. His characters manifest their individuality in the way they negotiate these disparate forms and mediums, ultimately making them their own and thus shaping their world.
In his new novel, Emerald Germs of Ireland, Patrick McCabe's trademark highoctane style is very much on display. Pat McNab of Gullytown - the hero of the piece - is a serial killer. Almost everyone who enters his mad, bad, crazily surreal world ends up dead. His mother, the turfman from Ardee and the three lovely lasses from Bannion are but a few of his victims, dispatched in the course of a story with McCabe's customary absurdist twists and turns. Readers, though, should not be overly distressed at the thought of gruesome murder and mayhem, as the emphasis is purely on comedy and entertainment.
In McCabe's most magnificently realised novel, The Butcher Boy, the blackly comic and the deadly serious worked in tandem to produce a multi-layered novel of mental disintegration within a madly alive portrayal of Irish small-town life. That delicate balance is in the main absent here and, like his last work, Mondo Desperado!, the result is consequently disappointing.
What was utterly original and highly innovative in the past has become, sadly, somewhat tired and limp now. Each chapter is given the title of a well-known song - Whiskey on a Sunday; Fly Me to the Moon, South of the Border - and acts as a wry comment on the subsequent action. As with Mondo Desperado!, McCabe indulges in some genre jokes relating the story, for instance, in the style of a spaghetti western or some bad (aren't they all?) American TV movie.
Emerald Germs of Ireland may be already familiar to those who listened to the RTE radio series of the same name last year. Indeed, traces of its first public presentation linger heavily over the entire project. McCabe's unique literary perspective, with its stress on voice and accent along with his musical obsessions, are perfectly adaptable to the possibilities of radio. However, one problem is that the episodic nature of a half-hour radio drama does not translate very well into the novel form.
There is a sense that the chapters gathered here could be a collection of short stories, so non-existent at times is McCabe's attempt to bring it all organically together. There is no development in the usual expected way and, instead, we are offered a quite repetitive narrative: Pat McNab murdering everyone who crosses his path.
The character of Pat McNab is problematical, too. He is cartoon-like in his motivations and desires; and is quite unconvincing. Again, that balance achieved by McCabe in his earlier creations Francie Brady and Patrick "Pussy" Braden, is missing. The characteristic energy of his writing becomes dissipated when there is no purpose in sight other than attempting to make his reader laugh. Like the current trend in Irish movies and TV: to say "Feck" is not, in and of itself, very funny. What replaces comedy is something much more shallow and on the surface.
There is one chapter in Emerald Germs of Ireland, though, that does confirm how brilliant Patrick McCabe's fiction can actually be. It concerns Pat McNab's rediscovery of his little metal toy soldier. Here, authentic feeling is mingled with the author's distinctive array of literary and musical references, resulting in McNab's madness becoming simultaneously believable and sympathetic.
It is in moments like these that Patrick McCabe proves that he is one of the better and more imaginative writers writing here or anywhere at the present time. There can be no doubt that his talent will go on to prove that fact again and again in the future.
Derek Hand is Faculty of Arts Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD