Rating: 
Summary: clever, entertaining, a bit mad but human
Review: This is a fast paced, first person narrative which is deliberately written (I think) so you can't trash it's contents by contextualizeing it or categorizing in a neat nationalist or unionist, British or Irish box. People like Pat Braden do exist in Ireland so this book is all the stronger for giving a voice to an interesting character. Just where the book leads to, you need to read for yourself but it's a worthwhile exploration, as I say, entertaining and well-written. A bit confusing in parts but realistic. More feel-good than Ian McEwan's equally well written Amsterdam which left me cold.
Rating: 
Summary: I just did'nt like it !
Review: This is the first time for me to read McCabe.Being a Booker finalist and reading the Customer Reviews,I had high expectations.Roddy Doyle,McLiam Wilson and Brendan O'Carroll as well as the McCourts really ring my bell as modern writers.Hence I was hoping for something more like that.I read about 150 books a year and like characters I would enjoy meeting,even if fictional.I like to be left with something upon finishing a book.From our school days,we were fed the academic line about what a good book was;books that have been awarded honors,classics,etc.
About all that did was turn me off from reading and I assume the same with many others.Once I started serious reading and found authors I enjoyed ,a whole world opened to me.This book didn't give me what I look for. I have a copy of McCabe's "Emerald Germs of Ireland" which I will read shortly;maybe I'll like it.If not,we'll just move on, there are so many books and so little time.I have no argument with those who rated it highly and enjoyed it.Heck ;that's what life is all about.Art,Music,People,Places,we don't all like the same things;and who's to say what's great?
Rating:
Summary: Sanity of a pervert in perverted world sanity
Review: To tell the truth, I've opened this book only because it was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. I was disappointed from the very start - perverted hero, distorted English, weird plot. Modern novels are crowded today with gays, lesbians and all other kinds of sexual minorities as if straight Homo sapiens is vanishing from surface of the Earth. As if the author couldn't find normal heroes and normal words to tell his readers about problems of Northern Ireland. But nevertheless I finished my reading and changed my opinion in the end. Because Pat Braden, the hero of the book, transvestite and male prostitute, is the one who is sane in this perverted world where the blood streams and bombs explode, where people hate each other with inclination for consolidation only to exterminate anyone who differs from them. Pat, abandoned by mother, repudiated by father and unloved by most people, in his search for love is more human than his surroundings. The world is not so beautiful place to live in, Patrick McCabe tells us, sometimes it only a bit differs from abattoir, but it will not come to the end while its exhausted inhabitants still hope for love. The book includes really excellent pages, especially the inserted story of a man who crossed the border in pursuit for love but was tortured and killed by human (or unhuman) intolerance. By and large, this book is more worthy of Booker Prize than Ian McEwan's cold satire.
Rating:
Summary: Looking for love in all the wrong places.
Review: With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect. While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten.
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