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A Terrible Beauty
| Article
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10162 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1993 |
2,492 Words |
| Author
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Robert Cranny
Robert Cranny is an author and playwright living in New York.
The Big Out is his one-man play based on the life of Ernest
Hemingway. His books include On Us Thy Poor Children and the
forthcoming Faces along the Bar. |
THE BUTCHER BOY
Patrick McCabe
Fromm International, 1992
It came to Samuel Beckett one night while he was standing on a pier in Dublin that all he had going for him was his depression and that was the place in himself from which he should write. Beckett's voice is like a light that slowly blows itself out in the face of the void it can never comprehend. The voice of Francie Brady in Patrick McCabe's brilliant new novel, The Butcher Boy, is one of defiance hiding its spirit in insanity--a sanctuary where it will not only survive but even triumph in the end. There is a great joy in his madness and a decency that cannot be corrupted despite the dastardly acts he perpetrates.
Francie Brady is seen as a monster, but all he wants to do is to make everything right. He is not a patriot, not a hero, and would have little truck with the wrap the green flag round me crowd, but he is one of the most tragic characters in contemporary Irish literature. He speaks for all the others like him in a land full of Francie Bradys: those who are left behind in the shame of drunken fathers, and mothers who are overwhelmed by the circumstances of their lives and the legacy handed down by generations of oppression and deprivation and the harshness of a religion that bade them accept their shame on their knees.
The false antidote to shame is respectability taken on with a fervor and a fierceness, a looking down on those worse off than themselves. Such are the circumstances in the town where Francie lives. A not unusual Irish scenario for this is what comes of cultural domination. But the English will never know the true extent of their oppression--the lunacy created by poverty and the shame and the spiritual isolation that goes with it.
The madness is in creating appearances that will keep the shame hidden, especially from each other. Victims take on the shame the oppressor refuses to take on himself, and they keep asking the bewildering question--what did we do wrong? They tell themselves they must deserve to be the victims because there must be something wrong with them.
The very landscape of Ireland has loss in it. It holds all the pain, all the memories. An Auschwitz of the heart. "You have the heart scalded out of me," the old women of Ireland used to say. There is a lonely pathos in the land. So much has passed through it and so many have gone away and still the
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