Elizabeth Platt ([email protected])
Tue, 24 Nov 1998 19:01:40 -0800 (PST)
WSJ: WEEKEND JOURNAL: Bookmarks
DJ 11/19/98 23:07
From The Wall Street Journal
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
By Patrick McCabe
(Harper Collins, 202 pages, $22)
Patrick McCabe is one of the modern Irish novelists who
(along with Roddy Doyle, Demot Healy, Colm Toibin and a dozen
or so others) make you wonder why America gives so much press
to their comparatively bloodless Brit cousins to the east. Mr.
McCabe is the lodestone of new Irish fiction, a writer capable
of integrating the history and traditions of his country and
its literature with the mad whirl of modern politics and pop
culture. His most widely read novel, "The Butcher Boy" (made
into a harrowing film by Neil Jordan), could have been
subtitled: "Portrait of a Cheerful, Homicidal Psychotic as a
Young Catholic Schoolboy." His latest, "Breakfast on Pluto"
(the title is from an obscure 1969 pop song), could also be
called "Portrait of a Glam-Rock-Loving Transvestite."
Trust me, that subtitle doesn't scratch the surface. Patrick
"Pussy" Braden, of the village of Tyreelin, Monaghan, near the
Ulster border, is the product of a moment of madness between
Father Bernard and his housekeeper, whom Paddy recalls as a
dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor in "South Pacific." (In other
words, like all of Mr. McCabe's characters, the bastard child
of a decaying old culture and an effete new one.) Abandoned on
a doorstep in a Rinso soap box, Paddy grows up fantasizing
about being crooned to by Vic Damone and of being Dusty
Springfield, of whom he apparently does a killer impression.
Condemned to a foster home and a chain-smoking, Guinness-
guzzling foster mother, he gets himself kicked out one day for
modeling mom's underwear.
Taking up residence in an early '70s London just beginning
its glitter-glamour rock phase, Paddy hooks for a living and
is a hit at parties with her Dusty Springfield impressions (by
now Paddy, who narrates some of the chapters, is referring to
himself as "she" and "her"). But after a particularly gruesome
IRA bombing, Paddy, whose miniskirted outfits are viewed by
British police as the ultimate terrorist disguise, is deported
to Ireland and back into the arms of his loved ones. ("It's
him!" says his foster mom. "My twilight zone son!")
Paddy's flighty indifference to the inferno of politics
raging around him-her ("It's bombing night and I haven't got a
thing to wear!") is more than a device to set up some
screamingly funny situations. It also enables Mr. McCabe to
delve into the horror of the conflict without the slightest
recourse to melodrama. No doubt some readers will be offended
-- perhaps understandably -- by the treatment of so dreadful a
subject in so irreverent a manner. But in the maelstrom of
raging conflicts that mark the ongoing war in the north of
Ireland, the sweet absurdity of Pussy Braden's world comes off
as the only sane response.
(MORE) DOW JONES NEWS 11-19-98
11:08 PM
Copyright 1998 Dow Jones & Co., Inc. All rights reserved.
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