SAINTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW

it was definitely for the best that i was disuaded last thursday, the seventeenth of march, from writing on patrick mccabe's second to most recent novel, the holy city. i hadn't looked at the the article with which i'd planned to compare some of the book's more prominent social themes since reading it a month ago and didn't remember the title. had i had it on me last thursday, i surely would have stayed my own hand: regardless of what you might think of the church and the feast of st. patrick, directly addressing "the irish affliction" (as the article is called) on that day would be in unarguably poor taste. (likely hard pressed to find a date that didn't closely correspond with a prominent catholic feast, the new york times magazine ran it on the eve of valentine's day.)

fortunately, the intercession of the weekend hardly makes this review any less timely, because it wasn't in the first place -- but neither, for that matter, was the magazine article. the scandals that continue to plague the irish catholic church are hardly breaking news. rather, this post should be just casually regarded as the second installment in what might or might not become a loose series of articles on older books by former booker shortlist authors (begun with my writing, earlier this year, on my experience reading wide open by nicola barker).

the holy city was first published in the united states in december of 2008. it's first american edition was a paperback, which was probably the result of a lukewarm critical reception and that the original british edition's sales were correspondingly poor. i'd been a big fan of mccabe's since breakfast on pluto, but after my underwhelming experience with winterwood in 2007, i wasn't ready to pounce on what sounded to be just more of the same a year later.

and patrick mccabe has written quite a bit of the same. i've regularly described him as a more literary chuck palahniuk, principally because both authors make wide and deft use of punchy vernaculars in voicing their frequently delusional (and sometimes psychotic) characters, many of whom are men with mommy issues straight out of freudian analysis -- though they're not necessarily straight. (pussy braden and brandy alexander are both brilliantly written and wonderfully memorable.) however, mccabe's writing is, in general, less traditionally structured and punctuated than palahniuk's, which often lends an ethereal poesy to the fantastic flights of his characters' recollections and imaginations.

so perhaps by more "literary" i mean just more psychological, or maybe even just more european: i can't completely deny that i might just have been seduced by the exoticism of the gaelic lilt with which mccabe executes his narratives. still, for all their menial labor and common public houses, the culture of -- and attention to culture in -- mccabe's novels seems higher. in the holy city, for example, the protagonist has a near obsession with a portrait of the artist as a young man, and his style in telling his own story owes an evident debt to joyce ( although, while that's certainly an argument for mccabe's literariness, it's not, i suppose, a defense of my european bias).

in any case, i make the comparison with palahniuk mostly to argue that both authors have a similar appeal as a result of having mastered their respective offbeat voices. ironically, those voices, initially responsible for the excitement surrounding each author's cachet, have become equally redundant through their development over the course of the authors' careers. both of them have been rehashing the essentials of the same books for most of the past decade. which isn't to deny the talent of either one (nor to confirm it). if you're a fan, by all means keep reading. as for me, however, i don't plan on spending any more time with palahniuk. after reading reviews of the holy city, i'd resigned myself to being bored with mccabe as well. then out of nowhere: i longed for the sound of that voice and the feeling of its cadence. i really didn't care what it was about.

and the holy citywas more of the same. christopher mccool (just call him "pops") is the bastard son of the wife of henry thornton, a stiff upper lipped member of the protestant gentry, and stan carberry, a catholic, who lived down from the manor. chris grows up at a cottage he calls the nook under the guardianship of dympna mccool, another catholic, and is visited only infrequently -- and in secret -- by his mother, lady thornton, and one of her wealthy protestant friends. he spends his early adulthood as a fixture of the town's nightlife in the swinging sixties, during which time he figured himself to be largely reponsible for infusing cullymore with the swagger of carnaby street. the details are told in retrospect: chris the narrator is sixty-seven and living at an assisted living facility. he's been institutionalized at least once, and from his talking about his seeing his doctors there appear in his room in miniature to berate him, it's not too far a leap to assume that vesna, the deceitful croat with whom he now shares his life at the "happy club," is probably a doll.

chris also probably flirted with pederasty at one very formative time in his life, and he's definitely a racist. the swirling connections of all of his hangups and delusions intersect at his insecurity over being abandoned by his mother, which he does his best to disguise by insisting on his understanding of the natural differences between protestants, ambitious and even tempered, and catholics, recklessly passionate and superstitious, even as he struggles to rationalize his protestant aspirations and catholic urges. the holy city isn't simple (the title itself is a reference to a hymn that mccabe uses as a metaphor for chris' yearning for salvation through a sanctified love), but neither is it really unique among mccabe's other books. chris mccool reads too similarly to most of mccabe's other protagonists to really distinguish himself (specifically those of mccabe's best books, the butcher boy, breakfast on pluto and emerald germs of ireland). the tightly limited perspective that gradually reveals its own lapses of judgment and self-deceptions amidst the echo of period or pastoral song lyrics in the sanctuary of a constructed past pattern can only be repeated so many times before becoming utterly predictable, if not downright boring.

like i said, though, it had been a while, and i was happy listening to chris rave. and maybe it was because it had been so long since i'd engaged someone like him that i took some of what he said to heart. or maybe it was because of that article. "the irish affliction," by russell shorto is essentially just new reportage on the struggle of the irish people to work out their issues with a deeply entrenched catholic church that is increasingly mired in the emergence of more and more information about its sexual scandals. however, it also underscores the issue by tracing how over the last century, politicians and clergymen, despite the efforts of some of the irish intelligentsia, "wrapped irish patriotism together with catholicism, agrarian traditions and the gaelic language...[and] thus the 20th century image of "irishness" came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church."

the image of irishness in the novels of patrick mccabe is very much the same -- although in those books its strictures tend to make someone crazy or get someone. in particular, the holy city seems to represent that same irishness as it is being confronted by ireland's secularization. in his article, shorto describes the struggle of an increasingly wealthy and modern country to shrug the yolk of its traditional historical church-state relationship. as much as many irish people might view the church as destructively antimodern, others, "find the idea of abandoning catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity [sic]."

while the ever present foil of protestantism has other political and historical implications in his case, chris mccool is still in much the same position in the holy city as the one described in the shorto article. "if you want 'the good times', there is no better period in which to be alive. nobody will bother you -- you can more or less do whatever you like...no one will care," he remarks from the happy club. "you can rest assured there will be no intervention. it makes the assertions of sixties freedom look so childish." in the nineties, money had come to cullymore, too. now that he has his macintosh computer, chris looks laughingly back on the days before the white room: "what i came, more than anything, to conclude was that, in fact, what had been taking place with that seventeen-year-old boy was that i had been projecting my own needs and desires on to him." (methinks that shorto should have added "darkly hilarious" to his description of irishness.) "and was using both him and the textures and colours and beliefs of catholicism to try and find a place, i suppose, a home for my own particular 'excitable passions'."

that realization comes to chris about halfway through his story, and it isn't his last. recantations abound in the holy city. vesna is a catholic, too, and in addition to having to deal with that mess, that boy continues haunting chris through the end of the book. but he's just a deluded old man, and had it not been for that article, i probably would have stopped reading before his own story made a complete fool of him. mccabe never lets chris say one way or the other what he's finally decided about his identity, but that indecision makes an important point. it's a good thing that mccabe has a knack for manifesting the rural charm of the struggle. the gothic humor helps, too: that was a good deal to write on a book i didn't really like.