Carn
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
‘It seemed as if the town of Carn, a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.
For a split second, she saw her own death, a gunmetal face fixed on the sky, all around the faces and voices of Carn as she had known it. Josie Keenan had come home to the town of Carn, the only home she knew’
‘A unique record by somebody who understands that the reality of small-town life is as important in literature as any aspect of Ireland . . . a savage, raw and bitter honesty . . . I know no Irish writer with such an obvious, extraordinary talent’ Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent
‘Powerful, precise writing – Patrick McCabe’s Carn introduces one of the most promising writers in a long, long time’ Bill Buford, Granta
‘Resolute . . . the writing is raw and didactic. His story bears the hideous ring of authenticity’ Guardian
‘Stylishly narrated, but with the chronological forthrightness that comes as a benison after some modern novels’ London Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The night the Railway closed." So starts this early work by the author of the Booker-shortlisted Butcher Boy, which ends like it begins, with a demise-of an era, as the economic prosperity of the 1960s crashes into the horrific sectarian violence of the '70s and the economic slump of the '80s. In between, the book is a pulsing slice of 20th-century Irish soul that constitutes a historically accurate, vibrant portrait of a rural Irish border town-the "Carn" of the title. McCabe fashions a portrait of a place and its people that is tough and funny but, above all, authentic. His flair for depicting the customs, humor, hopes and disappointments of his characters through lively vernacular renders them totally believable. The reader is enmeshed in the lives of Carn's inhabitants as they coast through a glorious boom. Cooney, the returned emigrant to America, becomes a superstar when he opens a prosperous new meat-processing factory. Josie, the wrenchingly sad town bad girl, returns from exile only to wind up an outcast. Others, like young Sadie and Benny, learn to accept the failure of their dreams as the good times come and go. The politicians pontificate and the British army moves in across the border. By the closing page, Carn's youth are boarding transatlantic flights, and, on the hill above the town, the "rusting tower" of the defunct meat-processing plant stands as silent as the rotting train station. This is an extraordinary novel from one of Ireland's most talented writers.
