If the alcoholic O’Brien had indulged in different drugs, he might have written this book.

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. 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. 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. Una, who works as a cleaner, has a brother Dan, whose ontological status is to say the least uncertain. At its centre is Una Fogarty, illegitimate daughter of Dots, an Irish prostitute. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one family's history-and the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate.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. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan's mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger- and more sinister.Ī swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabe's epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Young Una's search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she'll never get over. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England.

Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.

Poguemahone book