Golden years in purple prose

The Holy City By Patrick McCabe. Photo / Supplied

After the chill, unsettling Winterwood, McCabe's new novel returns to his usual ingredients: mad black comedy mixed with past traumas; popular culture; small-town Ireland; bog Gothic ambience.

The energetic, unreliable narrator (another McCabe characteristic) this time is 66-year-old Chris McCool, whose surname radiates significance. He's the refined boulevardier of Cullymore. With his compliant Croatian girlfriend and his resemblance to Roger Moore, Chris ("just call me Pops") seems set for the most high-carat of golden years. But things aren't that easy. His Ireland is strained by change. "The world has come to our door with a roar."

East Europeans and "blacks" are flooding in; the stamp exchange store is about to be turned into a cultural centre; his new psychotherapist is a Hindu. So Chris' mind and habits turn increasingly to times past. Rose-tinted times: the 60s, when he was the hippest mover in his unhip town.

Days of Lulu, Ford Cortinas, pillbox hats and beehive hairstyles, plus his own wardrobe of crushed blue velvet pants and frilly pink nylon shirts. And especially of swinging chicks, among them - most especially - one Dolores McCausland. To Chris, this was "an almost fairytale period of history".

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to own a Raquel Welch poster was very heaven. However, as the novel reveals and reminds, this was also a time of religious bigotry. For Chris, it meant a titular father obsessed with saving "the muscular Protestant character" from "unreasonable and quite hysterical Catholics".

Since Chris was sired at the back of a barn by one of the said hysterics, life is strained from the start. Indeed, it's "subordinated entirely by the forces of iniquitous, dissolute emotion". Yes, McCabe writes like that all the time. His style is blarney on steroids, prosing and prattling. It seems not so much written as dictated without pausing for breath.

Language and plot promise much. Do they deliver? They certainly disconcert, swooping from bouncy to bleak, love-and-peace to search-and-destroy. Red-blooded roistering leads to twitching rehabilitation. But there's a growing feeling of running on the spot. The juxtaposition of ephemera and agony that punctuates the novel is disturbing at first, tedious by the end.

The best parts are where Chris' nostalgia swells into yearning, when the din and distraction of night clubs yield to the white truth of a psychiatric ward. A book to divide its readers. You'll either buy copies for your friends or use your own to throw at a squatting dog.

The Holy City
By Patrick McCabe (Bloomsbury $35)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.