PATRICK McCABE, THE MASTER technician, is up to his tricks again – the familiar, exotic, transfixing narrator, the freewheeling language, all buttery words and lubricious ways, the offbeat story of inward lives escaping the nook of Irish rurality wit
h its twisted squint at the world, its dark besetting tragi-comedy, parochial but with global aspirations.
Of course, escape is not on the cards. It never was; these tangled towns and mucker villages, higgledy piggledy, outwardly charming, attracting strays and outrageous outsiders, are deadly terrain. And by now, the scrapheap of McCabe's recycled heroes is growing apace – towards the height of nonsense into the stratosphere of baloney – but what delicious nonsense The Holy City is – as good as anything he has written since The Dead School, maybe better.
Here joining the litany of scratchy, off-kilter voices comes the novel's brand-new sly-boots, our schmoozing narrator, CJ McCool. Words melt in his mouth, women melt in his arms, the past flows easily through the laby-rinthine tunnels of his self-serving imagination. There he stands, irresistibly Brilliantined, aftershaved and blazered, twisting and boogying, light and fantastic, cutting a swathe of untrammelled fiction, part-time truths, and ingenious invention through his 1960s memories in Cullymore.
CJ McCool, it transpires, is a bastard chameleon, son of the wife of Dr Thornton, the Protestant squire. McCool has been sired by a Catholic labourer called Carberry and raised by his wife Dymphna, a zealous Catholic. The "high-bred Protestant lady" visits young Chris clandestinely, she reads to him; he is given Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Proxy innocence? Not a hope.
For the world of CJ McCool holds little innocence of its own. He is an outcast, disowned, an embarrassment, an emblem of two traditions, two religions, torn by divisions of class and allegiance, namely: the overarching supremacy, in Thornton's belief, of the Protestant, underscored by the wheedling subservience of the Catholic – the zealous Dymphna, ever symbolically, imploringly, on her knees, before she dies young, abandoning Chris. Little wonder the fickle finger of paranoid schizophrenia strokes his brow and obsession stalks his future.
It is a future lit by wonderful walk-on characters who inhabit the village bar, the Mood Indigo nightclub, who swan and sashay, augmenting the pulse and soundtrack of 1960s pop; take laid-back Teddy 'The Hippy' Maher, and 'Dolly Mixtures' – Dolores McCausland – a Protestant swinger who wears cheeky dresses and dances provocatively to the beat of the times-a-changing. She senses in Chris something vaguely Protestant; she dubs him her Mr Wonderful on account of his passing resemblance to Roger Moore.
Chris, if not godly, is afflicted by religion, and this ostensibly attracts him to Marcus Otoyo, a suave young Nigerian, both scholarly and devout. We learn, in fits and starts of painful recollection, how Chris perceived this rival outsider, and how, during spells of psychoanalysis, while Chris is enjoying the dubious hospitality of the local asylum, there are others who infer a contrary motive for Chris's attraction to Marcus's otherness.
McCabe, of course, plays games, teasing the reader with half revelations, just as Chris plays games with Marcus. Something happened between Chris and Marcus in the cathedral (speed, if you wish, to page 83 for full disclosure); something too happened with Dr Mukti – "the unfortunate boiling water episode", as Chris calls it.
And then there is sad, beautiful Vesna, who weaves through the tale, the Croatian mistress, bringing new joy to the now 66-year-old CJ's existence. Is Vesna faithful? Can beauty be trusted?
The Holy City is a tale of loss and lust, of a mad bereavement for something clutched at, something stillborn, which makes it tragic. What makes it bearable is the language of its telling, which never falters.
