in the wake of poseidon
Yesterday I finished Patrick McCabe's Poguemahone, which was published by Unbound, which publishes reader-supported books; I was one of this book's supporters, since McCabe's The Butcher Boy left an indelible impression on me. I read and enjoy plenty of books whose pages I'd have to re-skim to remember their details, books whose plots and characters begin fading shortly after I return them to the shelf; but several scenes in The Butcher Boy will be with me as long as I live. Francis talking to the fish and telling them to fuck off. Francis at the neighbors' house. Francis learning the truth of his parents' trip to Dublin. I haven't cracked this book open in at least a decade, but it stays with me.
Poguemahone is a big book, but it's in free verse, and it goes quickly. It's a ghost story – mostly these are modern ghosts, which is to say, workings of the subconscious and of history and of the world in general, but it's also a story told by Dan Fogarty, something more like a real ghost: the brother to Una Fogarty, presently residing in a care home at Cliftonville on the English coast. The days of the Fogartys' youth were spent at a drug-addled post-hippie crash pad called the Temple of Mahavishnu, a sort of Amityville house that chewed up everybody inside it; the bulk of the book is a recounting of that house's founding and the ill-treatment that Una, who only came there to clean the place, ended up getting from its inhabitants.
It's incredibly dark, and very funny, and, as we were just on the subject of Harlan Ellison, I'll say that it reminded me of one of his best stories, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" – the version illustrated by William Stout is a classic in its own right, though I would first have read the story in Deathbird Stories. Both are bleak-legacy-of-the-60s tales – Ellison's is about the fraying of American moral fabric and is specifically "anti-drug," though I feel confident he'd have seen that as an oversimplification; Poguemahone, too, boasts a house full of stoned young people who've lost their way, but trusting Dan Fogarty to give you a clear picture of them is a bad idea that's hard to resist. Hard, because the telling is lyrical, seductive, persuasive, and addictive: I finished this book inside of a week, I couldn't get enough of it, even as the horror of Una's life became harder to bear with each strophe.
McCabe would probably resent being called a moralist, and, in the absence of any positive models in the text, fair enough: the best people in the book are naive, and the worst ones got that way from being on the wrong end of poverty and racism and class distinctions, with the possible exception of Troy, a fairly monstrous egotist. But the strong moral bent to Una's story, the sustained howl of outrage at the mean scraps on which the innocent must be content to subside, can't be ignored. It's not the drugs that wreck the lives of the people living at No. 45 Brondesbury Gardens. It's something deeper down.
Very strong recommendation, especially to lovers of horror – this is literary horror of the highest mark.
