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'You Lie in Wait . . .': An Interview With Patrick McCabe
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10163 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1993 |
1,198 Words |
| Author
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Wendy Herstein
Wendy Herstein is an editor in the Book World section of THE
WORLD & I. |
THE BUTCHER BOY
Patrick McCabe
Fromm International, 1992
Patrick McCabe, born in County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955, lives with his wife and two children in London, where he is a teacher. In 1979 he received the Hennessey Award for a short story. His stories have appeared in several Irish publications, and his plays have been presented on Irish and English television. The Butcher Boy is his third novel. The film rights have been bought by Neil Jordan, director of The Crying Game. McCabe's own stage version of The Butcher Boy, entitled Frank Pig says Hello, has been acclaimed in Ireland and England.
THE WORLD & I: The Butcher Boy is such a sad book. Did you mean to break our hearts?
Patrick McCabe: It was described by one reviewer as "the mask of unbearable sadness through the ages," which is probably as good a description as you could come up with. There was a tendency in some quarters to view the book very simplistically, in the sense that it's simply about a young deprived boy, but it's about a lot more than that. It's a lot about a small community interacting superficially on one level but also battling together against mortality, if you know what I mean. And the difficulties of being alive together in any place in the world, whether it's a small place or a big city. If I could, without being too deep about it, do you remember the chapter with Uncle Alo's arrival back from London? There are the first signs we get that the Francie Brady character, whose antennae are so sensitive, is beginning to pick up that there's an awful lot more to the behavior of adults than meets the eye. It's as if his antennae have become so supersensitive that all the sadness in the world, which could possibly have been counteracted by idealism of some kind, becomes almost unbearable. There's an inexorable loss of everything that would have held the pattern together to some extent. His suspicions become a sort of a tidal wave of sadness. That's an antidote to the tendency some people have to view The Butcher Boy as some sort of a sociological treatise. By that I mean as simply about a young boy who loses all his friends.
W&I: Rather, it's about the human condition?
McCabe: It is, actually.
W&I: And you said something about people having to survive together.
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