I wake up today and go to the computer lab, which I am beginning to feel I spend way too much time in. I have just finished
Winterwood by
Patrick McCabe, and his books are always incredibly strange, but enjoyable nonetheless.
McCabe writes an unreliable and somewhat unstable narrator, which is typical of many of his works.
The main character Redmond Hatch has what he thinks is a normal happy life and initially it seems that his is going to be a good life. He is married, he loves his wife, his daughter is the best thing that has ever happened to him, and though he may not have a best job, he seems to love the work he does. Then, through the use of a series of flashbacks and strange encounters (which could be real or imagined)
McCabe takes us into the realm of the strange world of his main characters’ subconscious.
Redmond’s journalistic spirit and longing for some knowledge about his past sends him from his Dublin home to his mountain birthplace of
Slievenageeha, where he speaks with Ned Strange, a local storyteller and fiddle player. The story takes a turn when Ned is convicted of paedophilia and hangs himself in prison. Redmond finds himself obsessing about the disgraceful nature of Ned’s crime, as well as the time they once spent together in the mountains. And, as is true of
McCabe’s characters, Redmond becomes unstable and even reinvents himself. He divorces his first wife and marries another, starts a new career, and takes a new name.
An important element in the story is the dichotomy of mountain life, or what could be called traditional Irish life, and that of life in Dublin. Redmond Hatch’s former mountain home of
Slievenageeha is portrayed by everyone other than himself and Ned Strange as a backward town. Ned paints a romantic picture of the mountains and gives a lesson on traditional values and local history through his songs and stories, and through the ceilidh tradition. Dublin, on the other hand, is portrayed as an expensive, overpopulated place, and Redmond refers to the Temple Bar area as:
The epicentre of Dublin’s hedonistic empire, a playground exclusively populated by louche adolescent Euro-ramblers and indigenous chemical-filled youths vertiginously wading in the currents of an ever-expanding opalescent ocean, shorn of history and oblivious of religion.
This is a hostile view of modern day Dublin, to say the least. Whether
McCabe is making a personal commentary of Dublin life of the early nineties, or trying to give a glimpse into the hostile and introverted nature of his main character, it is difficult to tell. This view does seem to suggest, however, that Dublin is not the prosperous center of wealth and steady work that it seems. Redmond is unable to keep steady work in the city, can barely make the rent with his income and that of his wife, and his mind always seems to return to the stories of Ned Strange and of his former home in the mountains.
After finishing the novel, I go with a few people in the group to Penney's, which is packed full of woman of just about every age, climbing over one another to get cheap clothing. Needless to say, it is pretty frightening, and I won't be going back into Penney's in the near future. I buy a dozen nectarines from a woman selling fruit on the North Side for two Euro. We then go to the 2 Euro store, which is basically like the Dollar Store back in the States, where you buy a bunch of cheap stuff that you don't really need because it costs a dollar.
