Poguemahone (Gaelic for “kiss my a—”) is a 600-page novel driven by events real and imagined in a shared house in Kilburn in 1974, involving a bunch of belated hippies and counter-cultural pretenders, bent on changing the world while barely registering strikes, shortages and IRA bombings. At its centre is Una Fogarty, illegitimate daughter of Dots, an Irish prostitute. Una, who works as a cleaner, has a brother Dan, whose ontological status is to say the least uncertain. Dwelling in the margins, supercharged with folkloric vengeance, is he, as it were, an “actual” mythological figure, a “gruagach”, or merely not there? He is also the main narrator. In the near-present day we find Una, once an aspirant nightclub singer, at 70, in a care home in Margate, trying to round up the troops to put on a “caper” for the residents’ amusement.
There is plainly something of Flann O’Brien about this – the intrusion of the imaginary on someone else’s not wholly credible story, for example, as well as an affinity with the implacable, stony road-to-hellishness which underwrites the comedy of novels like The Third Policeman. If the alcoholic O’Brien had indulged in different drugs, he might have written this book. Let us be grateful for small mercies.
Poguemahone is described as a free-verse novel, which in the worst case would mean it possesses the virtues of neither. Patrick McCabe, best known for The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto (both Booker-shortlisted in the 1990s, and adapted into films), is not the first prose writer to seek the lingering prestige of poetry without having to write it. In fact it’s easy to ignore the verse, except as an effective scoring method: the reader hears the book as something spoken aloud, or whispered, or snarled, or insinuated or spat into his ear. The voice is an insistent companion who, having got hold of an elbow, has no plans to stop until his hour is exhausted or the auditor collapses under the weight of memory, bile, repetition and implication.
Relentlessness is something McCabe does very well: here, as in his dismantling of the priesthood in 1995’s The Dead School, there will be no prisoners. As the narrator affirms, “It’s a hard station, that’s for sure.” For 200 pages McCabe sustains a tremendous black-comic momentum. Real people turn up: a paralytic Brendan Behan inadvertently lays out the jazz composer Johnny Dankworth in a cellar club in Piccadilly while looking for English “fughers” to punish.
The second-rate and the second-hand form a motif: the hippies are pale impersonations of unimpressive predecessors. Their musical tastes are nailed as precisely as those of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. The greatest band of the era, in their view, are Mott the Hoople, whose best song was written by someone else, and whose biggest hit was a hand-me-down from David Bowie.
The hippies’ self-appointed leader, Troy McClory, is an egomaniacal poetaster and philanderer with a sideline as an art student (he fails all his exams). Una, unfortunately, is in love with him. He abuses her affection. And there is, or seems to be, or wants to be, something hidden in the walls of the house, muttering, crying out, occasionally addressing one of the residents or leaking drops of blood. There is a suicide, and the little colony fragments into disappointed adulthood. Readers of McCabe’s generation may well recognize the grim accuracy with which he depicts the self-deceiving nullity of the would-be artist. But given the current abundance of cultural bulls—ers, and the acclaim they manufacture, maybe Troy and the little tribe were simply ahead of their time?
After the halfway point, the book begins to feel like punishment. Una returns to the haunted house to retrieve her medal of the Virgin. Seemingly triumphant, she boards a packed train to Margate. Encountering a grandmother and two children, she is reminded of her long-ago effort to “rescue” two children from their junkie mother. Una’s tragedy – unloved, childless, marooned on the border of madness – plays out once more. It’s a hard station. It seems as if neither Catholicism nor the supernatural Celtic world can offer redemption nor even a break in the cycle of tormented memory – and if there’s a hint of the transmigration of souls at the very close, it’s just another wing of the all-seeing prison.
Poguemahone is published by Unbound at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
