Patrick McCabe hit pay dirt with his third novel, The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the 1992 Booker Prize, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism." In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also on the Booker shortlist, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate, mimicking perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the age of 14, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr. Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story; as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. --Alan Stewart


From Publishers Weekly
McCabe is a master ventriloquist. In The Butcher Boy he projects the voice of a brash, fast-talking, murderous boy in order to tell a story of divisive tension in a small Irish town. In The Dead School the liberalization of modern Dublin came to readers in the voice of a doddering headmaster. Here, in this Booker Prize finalist, McCabe walks far out on a limb: in the voice of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a male transvestite fathered by a priest and brought up by foster parents, he tells of life in a violent Irish border town in the early 1970s and an exiled existence in London. (Imagine Ru Paul discoursing on "the Troubles" over a top-40 soundtrack.) Of course, they are more Pussy's troubles than his countrymen's, but Pussy is perhaps the most unabashed narrator in Irish writing since Beckett's Malone. He's nothing if not full of style: "And who was it within my darkened cellbox upon whom mine eyes did gladly fall as there I sat sky-high a-twiddle, ringed around by stars and planets?" Pussy's tale, brief but never boring, is structured as the story told to his doctor in 56 tiny chapters with theatrical asides. Stigmatized as the bastard son of the town priest whose "starched vestments... were partly responsible for his son's attraction to the airy apparel of the opposite sex," Pussy flees to England, where his transvestitism looks suspiciously like a disguise (his old IRA connections are of no help in this regard) as he moves bout Picadilly Circus, picking up men, falling in love and fantasizing various bombing schemes to avenge his own sufferings and that of his down-and-out friends?Charlie, who falls prey to drink, and Irwin, killed by the IRA for informing. Comically self-absorbed, Pussy is nonetheless charming company, and McCabe manages adroitly to paint a tender portrait of lives destined to be lost to history?apolitical folk welcome neither in Catholic Ireland nor in the U.K. while the sectarian war rages on. A recently penned preface reveals the author's hope that this time is over and that a new tolerance of difference will take hold. (Dec.) FYI: The title comes from a 1969 chart-making song in the U.K.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
It's fair to say that McCabe's Irish novels can be termed tragedies; they usually center on hapless protagonists who are victims of their lifestyle, impulses, or just foolish dreams. The pedigree of his latest "hero" isn't promising either; he's Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a transvestite prostitute and bastard son of a local priest. Patrick's life and times are revealed through a diary he keeps as therapy for his psychic wounds. He struggles with his family history, loses a friend to the IRA, and falls in and out of love. As tragedies go, though, this is a light one; most of the violence is emotional rather than physical, and McCabe allows Pussy a glimmer of hope for a better life at the end. Nominated for 1998's Booker Prize and a No. 1 best seller in Ireland, this may not be the masterpiece the publisher is claiming, but McCabe (The Butcher Boy, LJ 5/1/93) certainly has a talent for creating memorable characters who are worth spending some time with, warts and all. For public libraries.-?Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Courtney Weaver
Where Breakfast on Pluto succeeds is where others have failed--by underlining the vast contradictions inherent in the Irish conflict.... The underlying grief resonates deeply and personally transforming what could be a literary trifle into an obsessive gift, from a man who may be one of Ireland's finest living writers.



"He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books...dissect life's miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel."



"McCabe may well be the lodestone of Irish fiction in the1990s."


Wall Street Journal
"Mr. McCabe is the lodestone of new Irish fiction, a writer capable of integrating the history and traditions of his country and its literature with the mad whirl of politics and pop culture."



"An unsparing account of Irish realities. [A] moving, brilliantly told tale...full of human comedy and cruelty."


From Booklist
Patrick "Pussy" Braden is just your average transvestite prostitute. After leaving her provincial hometown, Pussy spent several years in Belfast and London, keeping busy by reading movie mags, trying on lipstick, and shopping at Biba's fab boutique for sequined miniskirts. But no matter how happy Pussy seems to be, she is still haunted by the fact that her mother left her on the church steps when she was born, never to be seen again. Pussy has never ceased blaming her mother's disappearance on the man she believes is her father (and literally Father: Father McIvor, the highly respected priest in Pussy's hometown). All Pussy really wants is to find her mother and have her father acknowledge her. But it's the 1970s in Ireland: sectarian violence is coming to a head, and the personal has to take a backseat to the political. The very funny parts of the book ironically emphasize the ongoing horror of Ireland's religious wars. In his artful novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, McCabe has created an unforgettable heroine. Nancy Pearl


From Kirkus Reviews
An account of modern Ireland and her Troubles from the perspective of a small-town transvestite, by one of this years Booker Prizefinalists (Carn, 1996, etc.). Ireland has changed mightily in the last few years, but even today you wont find much o f a drag scene in County Monaghan up by the Ulster border. Thats where Paddy (Pussy) Braden got his start in life, courtesy of the parish priest who impregnated Pussys Ma in a moment of weakness. No one expects a bastard to amount to much in Ireland in th e 1960s, but Pussy goes way beyond the worst prejudices of his day. A weakness for his mothers underwear gets him booted out of the house, and on the street he promptly sets up shop as a hooker. One of his regulars is Eamon Faircroft, an IRA officer who a lways has plenty of cash on hand and is happy to spread it around. After Eamon dies in a bombing, Pussy moves to London to forget his troubles and Irelands. Fat chance. London in the 1970s is rife with Irish terrorists of all stripes, and Pussy turns out to be an IRA recruiters dream: Who would seem less likely to be planting bombs than a drag queen? Pussy is the type who has a hard time saying no, so he soon finds himself in hot water. But he is also an Irish scoundrelanother type altogetherso you can be pretty sure hell get away with just about anything he sets himself to. And since the whole tale is offered to us with that no-respecter-of-persons irreverence (Its bombing night and I havent got a thing to wear!) that McCabe has spent the last decade per fecting, you can also be sure that the pathos wont sink into the sort of melodrama that Irish narrators have lately been drowning themselves in. A good yarn, but nowhere near The Butcher Boy (1993): McCabes terrorist demimonde is at once too bizarre to be moving and too familiar to be fresh. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A screamingly funny look at a deadly reality."



"By turns hilarious and pitiably lonely, Patrick ["Pussy" Braden] is an unforgettable hero."

FROM OUR EDITORS

Set in Ireland and in England during the mounting political violence of the late '60s and early '70s, Patrick McCabe's Booker Prize-nominated Breakfast on Pluto is the simultaneously high-spirited and deeply sad monologue of orphan, transvestite, and consummate misfit Patrick "Pussy" Braden. The novel opens in London, as "her ladyship" breathlessly records the chaotic nightmare of her past for the elusive psychiatrist Dr. Terence. Twenty years earlier, Pussy fled the mad household of his Guinness-guzzling mother-for-hire in provincial Tyreelin, Ireland, to begin a new life in London. There, in the seedy West End, he risks life and limb as a transvestite prostitute. But the troubles follow Pussy as surely as his own terrible neediness; when an IRA bomb explodes in a London bar, the police finger him as the culprit.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Patrick McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutty survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the Troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. As Breakfast on Pluto opens, her ladyship, resplendent in housecoat and head scarf, reclines in Kilburn, London, writing her story for the elusive psychiatrist Dr. Terence, paring her fingernails as she reawakens the truth behind her life and the chaos of long-ago days in a city filled with hatred. Twenty years ago, she escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother, Whiskers - prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney - and her mad household (endless doorstep babas!), to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb among the flotsam and jetsam who fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus ("You want love? That what you want, orphaned boy without a home? Then die for it! Die! Die, sweet Irish!). But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy's existence. It is the 1970s, and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder.

SYNOPSIS

Patrick McCabe blew critics and readers away with his novel The Butcher Boy, the story of Francie Brady, a working-class boy in Northern Ireland whose life becomes a violent storm. That novel won the 1992 Irish Times-Aer Lingus Award and was nominated for Britain's Booker Prize. McCabe has returned to Northern Ireland with his new novelBreakfast on Pluto, which in its own zany way is an Irish Breakfast at Tiffany's, with a goodly dose of "The Crying Game" thrown in. Starring Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a woman in a man's body who knows how to make magic in the squalid world around her, Breakfast on Pluto is a literary event. McCabe is truly coming into his own, and this new book is wild and wonderful.

FROM THE CRITICS

Eve Claxton

Fans of McCabe's masterpiece, The Butcher Boy, won't be disappointed by Breakfast on Pluto. After the more detached style of The Dead School, the author has returned to his wildly evocative use of first-person narration, and in Pussy he's found a voice that matches butcher boy Francie Brady's fabulous exuberance.
— Time Out New York

Logan Hill

Anyone tired of sober, earnest Irish political tracts should find this Dusty Springfield-impersonating narrator's 'pastiche, wickedness, and cheek' more than just sexually liberating.
— New York Magazine

Weaver

Courtney

Michiko Kakutani

...[T]he confluence of Pussy's dysfunctional personal life and the dysfunctional life of his country...simply adds a pretentious gloss to what is ultimately a disappointing novel. —The New York Times

Guardian