Poguemahone
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker-shortlisted Irish writer McCabe (The Butcher Boy) unfurls a sprawling novel in free verse. Dan Fogarty is angry by nature and fiercely protective of his older sister, Una, 70, watching over her at the assisted care facility where she lives on the English coast. Dan spends much of the narrative recounting his family's exile from Ireland in the 1950s and Una's free-spirited life in the 1970s, when she moves into the "Mahavishnu Temple," a flop house in South London that's home to artists, drifters, and burnouts of all stripes. Orphaned early in life after the suicide of her disturbed mother, Una finds a new family in the Temple's eccentrics: Troy McClory, a charming Scot and would-be poet who wins Una's unwavering devotion; Tanith Kaplinski, an elegant, eccentric dancer; and Alex Gordon, the lecherous former British serviceman who maintains the property. Despite the free love and abundant substances, the Fogartys cannot escape the ill fortune that has followed their family since they were forced from the village of Currabawn. McCabe draws the reader into a rambling web replete with Gaelic folklore, IRA agitation, and a soundtrack of glam and progressive rock. Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe's career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma.
