Irish camp

The Troubles through the eyes of a transvestite

by Chris Wright

Music plays a big part in Irish writer Patrick McCabe's latest novel, the Booker Prize-nominated Breakfast on Pluto. Set in the tumultuous Ireland of the '60s and '70s, the story comes with a sort of soundtrack, mainly fluffy pop songs from that era.

The book's title is itself taken from a song (recorded by Don Partridge in 1969), and an epigraph gives us a snatch of its lyrics: "Go anywhere without leaving your chair/and let your thoughts run free/Living within all the dreams you can spin/There is so much to see . . . " Silly as they are, these sentiments are central to the book's main character -- a transvestite named Paddy Pussy (a/k/a Patrick Braden) -- for whom the silly and the sentimental serve as a bulwark against the horrors of the world.

The novel is framed as a memoir, penned by Patrick for the benefit of Terence, a psychologist on whom he has a hopeless crush. As such, the voice of the narrative is flirtatious, effusive, and utterly unreliable. The title of the first chapter -- "The Life and Times of Patrick Braden" -- might sound like the cheery, overblown prose of a kid, but Patrick's life and times are anything but cheery. Indeed, the "sordid, squelchy details" that he is about to set before us are often unsavory, and sometimes truly awful.

Spanning the worst years of the Troubles, with a protagonist who has been abandoned by parents and lovers alike (and even by his beloved shrink), Breakfast on Pluto is a novel of loss and longing, violence and skullduggery, loveless sex and creeping insanity. Yet as he has shown in his previous novels -- The Butcher Boy leaps to mind -- McCabe has an ability to relate awful details in a prose style so utterly original, so lively and witty, that we cannot help but smile even as we shudder.

Patrick Pussy Braden's voice is sheer joy: caustic, cartoonish, colorful, naive, trenchant, explosive, ironic, poignant, and hilarious. It is a voice gushing with gleeful audacity, made all the more compelling for the horrible events it often describes.

The story dates back, as Patrick tells it, to the day the town priest, Father Bernard, "put his excitable pee pee into the vagina of a woman who was so beautiful she looked not unlike Mitzi Gaynor, the well-known film star." In short, Patrick is the product of a rape. And this being patriarchal, provincial Ireland, the priest goes unpunished, the mother goes AWOL, and the boy grows up unhappy and unloved in the house of a wicked surrogate mother.

The absence of maternal affection hangs heavily on young Patrick. His youth is marked by such attention-seeking behavior as pinching a neighbor's knickers off of the washing line ("It was stupid, of course -- I mean you can imagine what I looked like in those voluminous monstrosities"). And his development into a full-fledged transvestite is intertwined with his search for his long-lost mother. "You always wanted to become her," says Terence before he himself flees Patrick's affections. "After all -- she could hardly walk away then!"

Understandably, perhaps, Patrick's penchant for women's clothing doesn't endear him to his neighbors. As he puts it, "I wasn't exactly growing up to become `Mr. Most Popular Adolescent Boy.' " But provincialism is the least of Patrick's worries. As the story unfolds, his hometown becomes more and more embroiled in the Troubles, and Patrick's coquettish voice stands out in even starker contrast to the brutality that surrounds him.

Though it's often a disquieting mix, some of the book's funniest moments arise from the clash of Patrick's frilly sensibilities with the grim realities of a land in the midst of civil war. At one point, Patrick is confronted by IRA assassins who he is convinced are about to murder him: "I mean you try talking to flak-jacketed men in ski-masks wearing only a hairnet and skyblue negligee!"

This image underscores the triumph of McCabe's book: we've been led through the Troubles a thousand times, but we've never had a guide quite like Patrick Braden. This is familiar ground made startlingly new -- and you can't ask for much more than that from a novel. Similarly, the hypocrisy of Ireland's Catholic church (a recurring theme of McCabe's) is eccentrically, and hilariously, highlighted by a scene in which Patrick marches into the local church for a showdown with his father:

Guess Who was on the cross as usual. Looking down to say: `Ah, Paddy.' `Ah Paddy, what?' I said and shook my head. What was He on about? As long as I could remember, there He had been with His crown of thorns, just hanging there, ah this, ah that, ah what. That was the question I'd been meaning to ask Him. `Ah what? Ah what?' So I asked Him. `What are you aahing about?' I said.

And it's a very good question. Of course the Catholic church looks down on someone like Paddy Braden, even while it harbors a craven rapist like Father Bernard. The passage seems to topple Ireland's wonky religious-based value system with the waft of a feather. Patrick -- sodomite, knicker thief, inveterate fibber -- is not the sinner here, no more than sectarian killers who bare their sins in the confessional are the sanctified.

As the cycle of violence and counter-violence gathers furious momentum, Patrick escapes to England, where he discovers entirely new breeds of danger. While selling his body on the streets of London's West End, he encounters a psychotic trick and is nearly strangled. Later he becomes implicated in the wave of terror being unleashed upon London by the bombers of the IRA. As things heat up, Patrick heads one chapter "Busy Men Prepare to Blow Up London and Get Pussy into Trouble." Despite the campy joviality of this, the rest of the book is indeed marked by real, serious trouble. Torture, murder, betrayal.

Again, though, Patrick's marvelous voice transcends the horror. As the trouble reaches its grotesque, convulsive apex, Patrick sees salvation in the bottom of a bottle of Chanel No. 5. While he wanders the streets of London, penniless and alone, he imagines consolations small and large: a sexy outfit, a place to call home, someone to love. Even when he eventually returns to his hometown and finds neither love nor asylum, Patrick's spirit doesn't fail him. Above the blast of limb-scattering bombs and the wail of unwanted children, Patrick still hears the music that serves as a soundtrack to his journey. The silly and the sentimental, after all, serve as a source of hope.

Like the song says, "Let your thoughts run free."