Emerald Germs of Ireland

OK... this is my first exposure to Patrick McCabe, and it's because I was at the library and just happened to pick this up... Emerald Germs of Ireland. It's a rather dark, morbid story, but one that I found strangely fascinating... Pat McNab is a 45 year old guy who lives (or I should say "lived") with his mother. She's a domineering sort, and Pat was raised in a somewhat feminine fashion. But one day he cracks and ends up killing his mother by "blunt force trauma". To cover up the crime, he buries her out in the backyard. Of course, the small Irish town he lives in notices her absence, and Pat explains it away as her having left to do some traveling. That matricide event starts the unraveling of what's left of his sanity, and also starts a series of murders (and garden additions) needed to prevent others from "discovering" his previous crime. You're never quite sure what's real and what's not in his world, but it's best not to become part of it... Many books like this would paint everything in a dark, sinister fashion. McCabe goes more for the comically absurd, and slowly paints a picture of McNab's background with each new encounter. While the subject matter isn't something you'd find funny, I couldn't help but laugh at some of the scenes that he painted for the reader. And once the magical mushrooms were introduced, you really didn't have a clue as to where things were going (or what was real vs. imagined). I'm intrigued enough to put him on my list of authors I need to catch up on...

This is about as dark as you can get: a funny tale of an accidental serial killer. Accidental, you say? What could you mean? This poor man does not want to be a serial killer. Blood, guts and gore do not arouse him. He simply wants to be left alone and kills the people who get in the way of his dreams. Ah, black humor...So wonderful and so misunderstood!

This book was truly wonderful. A genuine masterpiece of dark comedy. I've read a few of Pat McCabe's books, and I have enjoyed this one the most. I read the other reviews and was abhorred at the reactions. I encourage potential readers to dismiss these reviews. Pat McCabe is a special author, either you love him or you hate him. These people hated him mostly because of "The Butcher Boy." I'd like to inform them that "The Butcher Boy" was indeed a great book, but it was also a different book. This is distinctly different from his other books. I ask you to just read the first chapter. If you don't like it, put it down. But if you do like it, no one will be able to pry it from your hands.

If you've never read a Patrick McCabe book before, you're much better off starting with The Butcher Boy, The Dead School, or Mondo Desperado.Emerald Germs of Ireland is fine, but it doesn't have the wonderful stream of consciousness style of The Butcher Boy, or the riveting plot of The Dead School. In The Butcher Boy, McCabe adeptly paints exactly how Francie's world unravels. The things that happen to him are not out of the ordinary, but because of how he experiences them, they drive him mad, and the lyrical genius of that novel compounds it. There is an amazing exploration of mother-son relationships in The Dead School, and it fits into a complex theme of how a mother's actions effect whether her son will see women (and the rest of the world, for that matter) as basically safe or basically dangerous. In Emerald Germs, however, Pat's mother is already dead, and he's already on an "American Psycho" type rampage, which deprives us of McCabe's marvelous character development and illustrations of shifting psychological states. The only interesting parts of the book are Pat's nightmares, and even they seem like the author's attempts to rewrite "Psycho" with only slight variations. We never get any sign at all about why McNab is a murderer, and what's more, we don't even care all that much.Overall, I feel like McCabe was really slacking off on this book. He'll probably do well on book sales given how amazing his earlier works were, but this just doesn't deserve the attention. If you love Pat McCabe, and he wowed you with his other stories and novels, don't buy this -- you'll be disappointed.

I get giddy when I hear Patrick McCabe has a new book coming out. For years now, ever since by chance I was browsing in a book store and caught a glimpse of the interesting looking cover of a single, obscure copy of a novel called The Butcher Boy, I have been wrapped up as a huge fan. His subsequent books, The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto, Mondo Desperado and now this, The Emerald Germs of Ireland, have all been wonderful. This is a clever, brilliant lingual writer with a harsh comprehension of Irish, American, ethnic and other sorts of English slang as well as a gorgeous, modifed and tightly retrained knowledge of moving and hilarious storytelling.Each book by McCabe is a string of adjectives: brilliant, wonderful, funny, tragic, sad, moving, joyous, inventive, imaginative, amazing, heart-rending and silly. The Emerald Germs of Ireland is more of the same. It's a bit more difficult a read than his previous works, frequently going off into the surrealistic and understandable incomprehensible delusions of the protagonist, but you quickly get used to this so transfixed are you by what might or might not be happening next. This is both the saddest and funniest of McCabe's always sad and funny books and no author I have ever read (honestly!) has even been able to merge such suffering with such hilarious 'they-deserve-it--Good!' reactions from the reader.This is another masterpiece by an author seemingly only capable of writing masterpieces. McCabe is not the sort of author I smilingly recommend to friends, but the type of obsessively beloved writer I urge, push, force and demand they read. I leave off doing the same to you . . .