Poguemahone

By: Patrick McCabe

Narrated by: Patrick McCabe

A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.

Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger—and more sinister.

A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabe’s epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one family’s history—and the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate.

©2022 Patrick McCabe (P)2022 Patrick McCabe

Poguemahone and Finnegans Wake

“Poguemahone” & “Finnegans Wake”
Dropping acid before reading either of these two “Irish” masterpieces might clear things up.
Or not.
“Poguemahone” (which I guess is a term roughly equivalent to “kiss my ass”) by Patrick McCabe (67)
is a sprawling (600 pages) epic poem constructed in blank verse that is the tale wrapped around parallelish time-shifting universes of narrator Dan Fogarty and his sister Una, suffering from some dementia in care facility Margate. It is a bracing, inspired and pleasantly confusing novel m. I think it might be especially satisfying especially to those of McCabe’s vintage. I am 70.
If Mott the Hoople, Ziggy Stardust or Roxy Music ring a bright bell through the purple haze of your memory, the Poguemahone tales will be laced with cultural Easter Eggs.
Some literary critics have compared McCabe (whose novels “The Butcher Boy” and “Breakfast on Pluto” were both short-listed for the Booker Prize) to fellow Irishman James Joyce. Both share a heroic disregard for literary convention. Both somewhere along the spectrum of philosopher, comedian and anthropologist.
Many book reviewers have suggested similarities between McCabe’s new book and Joyce’s classic “Ulysses.” Both have a host of unreliable narrators, vivid prose,
telling detail, memorable Irish slang
and are longggg books.
All true enough.
However for me McCabe’s “Poguemahone” is mingled more naturally with Joyce’s more occlusive ”Finnegans Wake.” My admixture of these two works are linked because in the past week I have been listening to them in tandem as audiobooks.
For much of the past year I have been working my way through the FW text (29 hours 18 minutes) in a Naxos audiobook as read by the gifted actors Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan.
I struggled to make my way through FW for nearly 40 years with little progress. Joyce himself said FW might be more easily comprehended by listening to it read aloud rather that following the purposely abstruse words on the page. I cannot claim victorious understanding, but the fog has lifted a bit.
I chose to listen to “Poguemahone” read by author McCabe for the simple reason that the audiobook was inexplicably available weeks before the official May 3 publication date of the printed book.
McCabe himself is the agile audiobook reader with a myriad of voices, brogues, slang and dramatic acting at his command.
As with Ulysses and FW, I am sure there are myriad phases and inside jokes my American ears do not comprehend.
But the yarns and sprawling narratives intermingle not seamlessly, but in complimentary ways. Both have lysergic effects offering shifting patterns, unsourced visions, aural distortions and many, many jokes. Those few I could parse were brilliantly hilarious.
I would caution against driving an car or trying to navigate city streets with any of these books as a soundtrack.
Guh n’ayr’ee an tah leath!