Call Me the Breeze

Comparing this book to THE BUTCHER BOY, I would say that CALL ME THE BREEZE wins hands down in matters of plausbility. I found it all to obvious that a young man like Joey would find himself at odds with society, and yet there's a comic edge to this writing that was missing in his earlier novels, and that imparts a soft, cotton candy feeling to the book which is nice, and makes the reader feel as though the sights and sounds of a small town in Northern Ireland were drifting through the air like a dreamy Maeve Binchy novel, but for men maybe. The extreme FIGHT CLUB like violence of BUTCHER BOY and the implausible gender hijinks of BREAKFAST ON PLUTO take a back seat now to gentle, Philip Roth style light comedy about a pathetic wanna-be and how he gets to be the way he is. We've all seen the stereotype of the lazy Irish bum with desires bigger than his abilities to satisfy them, blowing bubbles in the air, prone to a large fantasy life, and not much good with women. Now McCabe gives us that character writ in neon letters in this tiny masterpiece of precious prose. One of his best, maybe THE best, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable Adam Sandler movie they make out of it.

Here McCabe conjures the same heart-wrenching sorrow of DEAD SCHOOL and BUTCHER BOY and manages to deftly mix it with the humor of EMERALD GERMS. This is a modern master at the height of his powers. He breaks your heart, then cracks you up. And the words are flowing like you wouldn't believe; amazing sentences here; he almost makes it look easy! But his quotes of Gogol throughout are apt; this novel deserves to be up there with DEAD SOULS. Just bursting as it is with all the classic themes, and each so elegantly and freshly handled: the young intellectual's quest for enlightenment; the artist's journey (as a struggling novelist and film-maker, I was particularly moved); the crazy misfit in possession of the truth yet ignored by society; the young man hopelessly in love with a girl who doesn't deserve it. Sound sentimental? Well, McCabe has such a capacity horror, for detailing evil, he's able to turn around and wring the truth out of high emotion and sentiment. "Sentimental" shouldn't be a dirty word, but so often it is because "love of mother," "longing for father," or "yearning for meaning" are so ineptly and mawkishly handled - then the sentiments become an insult to the true feeling. But McCabe grounds his story in the terror of the Irish Civil War - you know he knows what he's talking about. And he makes it hurt so good.

Patrick McCabe has long established himself as one of the more gifted contemporary writers and certainly one of the more creative. His writing style takes some getting used to for the novice McCabe reader, but despite what appears to be a confusingly insurmountable task in his first chapters, perseverance pays off and McCabe's gifts are stunning!CALL ME THE BREEZE, aptly titled, traverses the fanciful, quasi-delusional life of one Joey Tallon from the 1970s to the present. Joey lives in Ireland, is surrounded by a throng of characters that could be either real or drawn from his imagination. His adventures run the gamut from drugs, to crime and subsequent incarceration, to poetry, to screenplay writing, to Don Quixotesque, Don Juan-like meanderings with multiple Dulcineas, delusional inamorata - all the fantasies we have grown to appreciate form McCabe's mind - along with piquant and tender moments of actual introspection and intellectual diversions. Joey Tallon is a newly created figure that McCabe now places in the sanctum sanctorum of unforgettable literary 'heroes'. Yes, he is manic, contagiously enthusiastic about everything he encounters (or fantasizes), recklessly susceptible to heroes from Charles Manson to Hermann Hesse to Joni Mitchell, given to obsessive ambitions, yet he at all times is wholly lovable and believable to the reader. Think Stephen Daedalus, Holden Caulfield, etc.Gratefully there are many authors writing today with abundant talent: Patrick McCabe is toward the head of the line. He is not an easy read, but delving into this book will be an adventure you are unlikely to find elsewhere. For those new to his style perhaps reading THE BUTCHER BOY first will allow you to jump in to CALL ME THE BREEZE without the struggles that may face first time readers of his books. A significant novel and a true joy!

Patrick McCabe is one of the smartest writers working today, and Call Me The Breeze is his best book since The Butcher Boy, and maybe his best book to date. Fans of medernism will love this, but traditionalists may be put off by the way the narrative/plot is subsumed by character--many situations it's hard to tell if it actually happened or if it's just a figment of the protagonist's imagination--but regardless, BREEZE is a fascinating look into a troubled character that in many ways provides a model for our fragmented times. Fans of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, a brilliant book in its own right, will find much to love here. McCabe is a writer's writer but has largely been ignored in America but for other writers. But McCabe without question outshines many of today's so-called literary stars and CALL ME THE BREEZE is a novel that years from now will be heralded as one of the classics of the 21st century. Read it.

In his newest and most complex novel to date, McCabe gives the reader another disturbed young main character, trying to survive alone in a hostile world. Joseph Mary Tallon, the main character here, uses his personal journal to reveal his life in a small town on the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The journals begin in 1976, with brief narratives about a Provo murder and a suicide, suddenly shifting without transition to Joey's revelations about The Seeker, a deceased friend with whom he discussed Carlos Castaneda and listened to Santana. Again without transition, he describes his long-time relationship with someone named Mona, with whom he lives in a trailer at a sometime gypsy camp, though we also discover that he worships someone named Jacy from afar. Because Joey does not always explain background or identify characters, the reader is not always sure who the characters are, their roles in his life, or how events are connected. He is "scattered," shifting quickly from Provo activity, to a priest's plan for a peace rally, and to his own search for nirvana, all of which keep the reader constantly energized and involved in deciding what is real and what is fantasy. Clearly unstable, he is an unreliable narrator who tells us about the world from his very limited perspective.Unlike McCabe's earlier characters, Joey is intellectually curious, reading Hesse, T.S. Eliot, Gogol, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, and he is a compulsive writer. Despite his delusions, and his impulsive actions, resulting at one point in a jail sentence of several years, he achieves considerable success, writing stories, plays, screenplays, and even a novel. This allows McCabe to expand his scope beyond that of dramatic plot twists to show how one becomes a writer, how writing attempts to bring order to the world, and how writing, ultimately, can be misunderstood. When Joey eventually uses his writing in a bid for public office, the sympathetic reader roots for his success. Fully-developed and fascinating, Joey, like earlier McCabe "heroes," is a prisoner of circumstance and victim of fate. Through him, McCabe illustrates T.S. Eliot's point that "the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." By the time Joey and the reader have reached the end of this circular journey of exploration, both will have been on a wild ride in which dreams collide with realities, hopes bloom and are crushed in defeat, and tragedies exist within triumphs. Enlightenment, as we see here, sometimes comes at a huge cost. Mary Whipple