FICTION: The Stray Sod Country, By Patrick McCabe, Bloomsbury, 339pp, £17.99
THE SMALL TOWN is the nerve centre of Patrick McCabe’s fictions. It has long since become his hallmark. Painfully nondescript midland or border towns have recurrently provided the locus for his surreal fantasias, at once prompting and anchoring them. They are simultaneously places apart and excruciatingly familiar. Just as Dublin, the would-be metropolis, acted as the abiding core of James Joyce’s fictional views of reality, shadowy approximations and perverse reimaginings of his native Clones are the stock in trade of McCabe’s novels.
The Stray Sod Countryis an electrifying reworking of this quintessential terrain. The border town in this instance is dubbed Cullymore, and the narrative centres on the interactions of many of its key inhabitants during several crucial months in 1958. The concluding chapters of the novel suddenly push the action forwards to 1970 and finally bring it right up to the present. Events as a result that seemed comfortably distant prove to be part of an unfurling story.
Indeed, the novel forces us to rethink the precise lines of division between past and present. It raises troubling questions about the nature of Irish modernity and shows that we cordon off sections of our history in order to absolve ourselves of guilt or to ward off knowledge of uncomfortable truths. Above all, the attempt to separate a supposedly civilised present from a barbaric and unenlightened past are revealed as inherently self-deluding.
The survivors of the savage events that took place in the late 1950s in Cullymore open a historical centre. But their efforts to sanitise the past in their commemorative pictorial displays and to resurrect the notion of a small-town idyll become symbolic of the way in which such repackaging of history becomes another blinkering fiction. Each era simply invents different illusions by which to make things palatable.
Initially, The Stray Sod Countryplayfully lays bare the animosities of small-town life. The petty squabbles and jostling for control appear ludicrous but harmless. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that the class and ethnic divisions that separate Protestants from Catholics and rich from poor will have deleterious consequences. Moreover, sanity for McCabe is but another of the comforting fictions we use to shore up our identities. No one in this novel is in his or her right mind. All of the characters hear voices and are haunted by troubling presences, and they all struggle against violent impulses that they are ultimately powerless to resist.
The key conflicts in the novel centre on the parish priest, Fr Gus Hand, and Golly Murray, a young Protestant woman who has married a Catholic. Hand is eaten up by his jealousy of a former friend, Fr Patrick Peyton, who has made it big in the US because of his rosary crusades and become a confidant of movie stars. He is also stalked by a one-time colleague, James Reilly, whom he had sacked because he discovered him kissing a young boy in his classroom and who now threatens to kill him.
Golly Murray is taunted by Blossom Foster, wife of the town bank manager and the mainstay of the local Protestant community, because of her loss of status as a consequence of her interdenominational marriage and the travails caused by her son Boniface, who has Down syndrome.
Hand tries to assuage his vanity by staging what he hopes will be a hit show, a passion play, titled Tenebrae. Golly Murray, by contrast, accepts the patronising overtures of her Protestant friends and unhappily attempts to insinuate her way into their social echelons by helping with events such as the staging of a fashion show. Numerous other tales of rivalry are threaded through these stories. Blossom's son, an RUC policeman, for example, is engaged in a torrid affair with a local Catholic woman, whose brother has joined the IRA.
In a manner characteristic of McCabe’s fictions, the narration mischievously immerses itself in the delusional fantasies of its protagonists and makes gleeful play with their inner monologues, which are seamed with allusions to popular culture. The increasingly irrational interior worlds of this riven community are defined by wistful identifications with the reigning British and American movie stars, football heroes and musicians who dominated the media of the day. Laika, the Russian dog sent into space on a Sputnik mission never to return, is a particular point of reference for these unhinged characters.
In this imploding universe driven by rivalry and insecurity, nothing is reliable and illusions grow incrementally and gain ominous momentum. The reader is subjected to constant switches of tone and mood: savage comedy gives way to bitter tragedy, and surreal episodes yield to penetrating insights into the human condition.
Further unsettling any possibility of a fixed perspective, a Mephistophelean “I” narrator, who is otherwise unidentified, sporadically editorialises on things and interferes at will with the action. Like a debased communal id or a particularly fiendish version of an all-controlling author, he instigates some of the more explosive moments within the plot.
The Stray Sod Country, it is gradually revealed in the course of the novel, is a term from local folklore. It designates another dimension into which people sometimes find themselves straying, where they feel divorced from the real world and become strangers to themselves. It has explanatory force for McCabe's characters, who are not given to introspection, as it allows them to justify their obsessively stoked pathologies or lapses into violence and madness.
The violence that has bubbled beneath the surface of their perverse imaginings does not stay confined to this other zone, however, and slowly stories of sexual abuse, emotional cruelty, sectarian assassinations and savage assaults on animals and fellow human beings accumulate. McCabe’s unsparing satire reveals that all of his protagonists carry deadly secrets that remain incommunicable and that they are all capable of unspeakable cruelty.
The Stray Sod Countrypowerfully lays bare the illusion of community, of pure and self- contained notions of Irish identity and of rational existence. It also indicates, however, that it is false to presume our forebears were inherently more savage than ourselves. The past and the small-town worlds we would prefer to forget may be foreign countries, but we need to travel their terrain and become acquainted with their devastating perversities.
The Stray Sod Countryis a masterly and disturbing fiction infused with wicked gusto. It delivers all of the macabre unease and maniacal inventiveness that we have come to associate with Patrick McCabe's writing at its very best.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at University College Dublin
