Poguemahone

The  morning is new but the feeling is old
Intervene blackbird and shorten the road.

LISA O’NEILL ‘Blackbird’ (courtesy of River Lea Records)

Since astonishing the world with The Butcher Boy in 1992, Patrick McCabe has established himself as one of modern Ireland’s greatest writers, with fourteen novels, two Booker Prize nominations and a host of awards to his name.

With Poguemahone, he is breaking new ground.

It's a wild, 600-page ballad, a free verse monologue narrated by Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, who is looking after his sister Una, now 70 and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate.

From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village of Currabawn and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dots, their mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho, working in the Piccadilly bar run by their legendary Auntie Nano, another exile from Currabawn. How a young and overweight Una, finds herself living in hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s, and becomes infatuated with a two-timing Scottish poet and stoner called Troy McClory, much given to vatic poetry recitals and chanelling prog rock vibes. How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts, who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories, as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.

(Tim Graham/Getty Images)

What sets Poguemahone apart from the rest of Patrick McCabe’s work is its form. He's leaving the safety of the traditional novel behind him. No chapter numbers; no voice-of-God narrator; no safe handholds.

Instead, it’s structured like a swirling piece of music. The way words are arranged on the page matters. The spacing and line shapes and breaks open the meaning. At times it comes on like a modernist poem by e e cummings or William Carlos Williams; at others it’s a beat recital in the Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti mode; sometimes it makes you feel you're holed up in smoky North London pub with a folk band rattling out the auld tunes.

It’s a book that draws the reader in and asks you to look and listen, to follow it as it swirls and riffs across the page. Like the best ballads, narrative themes come and go and are reprised, each time with new variations, filling in more of the details of the Fogarty family history.

© Markéta Luskačová/Tate Gallery

It’s a huge shape-shifting epic of the Irish in England, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale McCabe has never attempted before.

Imagine the supernatural terror of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, combined with the experimental élan of Lanny by Max Porter and the mesmeric ventriloquism of Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman and you’ll get some idea of what McCabe has achieved.

Poguemahone is audacious; a magnificent work of art.

Allowing writers to take risks is what Unbound is for: we hope you’ll want to join us by booking your place at the bar nice and early and supporting the book now.

It’s not often you get to have your name listed in the back of a masterpiece.

‘Reading fiction will never be the same again.’ RODDY DOYLE on The Butcher Boy

‘A dark genius of incongruity and the grotesque.’ HERMIONE LEE on Breakfast on Pluto

'A savage and unfettered imagination.’ ERICA WAGNER on Breakfast on Pluto

‘A sustained achievement of often dazzling brilliance.’ IRVINE WELSH on Winterwood

‘Stark, fierce, and wonderful.’ CLAIRE KILROY on Hello, Goodbye

‘Gloriously deranged, wired to the moon, truly inspired.’ KEVIN BARRY on The Big Yaroo

'Like reading sections of Ulysses'  NEIL JORDAN