Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel

From the collectible art on the cover to its take on national stereotypes, Mondo Desperado! provides a look at Ireland's sacred cows: Depraved, voyeuristic schoolmasters! Student Priests! Delinquent Irish Nurses! Patrick McCabe has a way of starting out ghastly and inducing compassion for the characters by the end. Especially like the bit on clubbing in "Hot Nights At The Gogo Lounge!!!" Not everyone can get away with so many exclamation marks. Someday this book will be the basis of a sleeper hit movie.

I love Patrick McCabe's books. I really thought "The Butcher Boy," "Breakfast on Pluto," and "The Dead School" were exceptional so I knew I would love "Mondo Desperado" as well and I was right. This collection of stories is as wacky as they come (maybe even as wacky as "Breakfast on Pluto") but they are terrific and McCabe's alter ego, Phildy Hackball, is a character you won't soon forget.Even Pat Cork's opening "Appreciation" of Phildy's decision to cast the citizens of Barntrosna as characters in a low-budget, B-movie (reminiscent of those the boys used to sneak out of school to see) is hilarious. And the citizens of Barntrosna don't let Phildy down. Time and again, they prove themselves more than worthy of any B-moviemaker's attention.There is nothing quite as shocking in "Mondo Desperado" as the heinous crimes that took place in McCabe's masterpiece, "The Butcher Boy" and the citizens of Barntrosna aren't quite as off-the-wall hysterical as Patrick Braden, star of "Breakfast on Pluto," but "Mondo Desperado" does prove time and time again just how desperate the world really is.There is the priest who believes he has ordained Satan himself, the Barntrosna girl who finds lesbian love in London and most of all, there is Larry Bunyan, the protagonist of "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge." Larry, for reasons both he and I don't quite understand, believes his rather frumpy wife, Cora, is having more than one affair behind his back. Larry is overcome with disbelief, but still, he says, he really has to hand it to Cora, for who would have believed it.What McCabe's characters share in common, and the thread that ties these stories together, is the pathetic quality of their ludicrous plights. Plights they have, for the most part, created themselves. We don't want to be like them, but we can't help but see little bits and pieces of ourselves in them and it makes us laugh or cry...depending on good a sense of humor one has.I don't think "Mondo Desperado" is quite Patrick McCabe at his finest. I think you need "The Butcher Boy" or "Breakfast on Pluto" for that, but "Mondo Desperado" comes very close. It's satiric, it's wacky, it's ludicrous, it's truth masquerading as absurdity. If you haven't yet read Patrick McCabe, "Mondo Desperado" might be a great place to start.

Irish writer, Patrick McCabe seems to be someone whose work you either love or hate with no in between. Anyone who has enjoyed his other books, such as The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto or The Dead School, is going to love Mondo Desperado. The uninitiated are going to be in for a surprise with McCabe's highly distinctive voice and style. It is black comedy with a capital "B," but it is black comedy of the highest order. In Mondo Desperado, McCabe builds on his earlier themes of life in the rural Irish borderlands. This book, set in the fictional town of Barntrosna, is the perfect vehicle for McCabe to showcase his ironic observations of the modern-day world.The narrator of Mondo Desperado, which is structured like a series of short stories, is Phildy Hackball who takes us on a tour of Barntrosna. Although Phildy describes his major interests as being the cinema and drinking with his friends, his real passion lies in writing weird and wonderful stories based on his own unique observations of the residents of Barntrosna. With Hackball as narrator, McCabe allows himself carte blanche to let his absurdly comic imagination run wild. The results are dark, surreal, hilarious and outrageous. The tone of Mondo Desperado is in perfect keeping with its absurd subject matter. Hackball is a narrator who is never afraid of taking the liberty of using ten adjectives to describe something when one would have done very nicely. He gives us a view of life that is nothing less than a surrealistic riot, a panoply of color and activity concealed beneath the facade of the average Irish town.It is this very absurdity of the mundane and the ordinary that gives McCabe his unique vision of the world and sets his work apart from that of other writers. Although the events described in Mondo Desperado are surrealistic in the extreme, each one is firmly rooted in reality. We begin by identifying with the characters so completely and then McCabe, in his genius, takes them to the blackest reaches of their soul and inflicts upon them the most terrible and bizarre of circumstances. These stories of a stifling, oppressive society, of overbearing mothers and hard drinking fathers, of hormonally-crazed young people driven slightly insane are, frighteningly, only a small step away from the world in which each of us lives our day-to-day life.This is McCabe's unique talent and it is a talent he has developed to the fullest. He can make us laugh out loud and, at the same time, make us take a serious look at our prejudices, our stereotypes, our beliefs, our lives. Mondo Desperado is a book that deserves to be read by lovers of black comedy, lovers of good literature and anyone with an interest in modern-day rural Ireland. It is a wild roller coaster ride to the very edge of consciousness through a desperate world, indeed.

Subtitled "A Serial Novel," Patrick McCabe's latest book is actually a collection of short stories, all purportedly written by one Phildy Hackball, whose "major interests are 'the pictures,''having a few jars' and 'relaxing with friends.'" The latter should be few on the ground, if Hackball's treatment of his Irish neighbors in "Mondo Desperado" is any guide, for all are portrayed as either delusional or criminally repressed. Hackball (read McCabe) is a master of the shaggy dog story. His narratives may evoke the spirits of Mary Shelley, E. A. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even James Hogg, but they do so for no apparent purpose other than to frustrate the reader's expectations. Take the last, and longest of these tales, "The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan." When Noreen takes off for London to become a nurse at St. Bart's, she is seduced into a, gulp, lesbian lifestyle, replete with razor blades and leather. When her lover, mother, and priest, in company with Eustace De Vere-Bingham, "the effing Protestant," journey to London in hopes of returning the lass to Barntrosna, each is, like Noreen, seduced by his or her baser nature. Noreen's mother, for instance, belts a sister superior at St. Bart's who dares to impugn Noreen's character, and Fr Luke sets himself up as a kind of enabler/saint to drug addicts. Even those who find their way back to Barntrosna are haunted by their London experience. As always in a McCabe book, the joy here is in the author's masterful use of language. His periphrastic syntax and excessive use of exclamation points should be familiar to readers of "The Butcher Boy" and "Breakfast on Pluto." But "Mondo Desperado" never quite rises to their level of brilliance. It lacks the emotional center provided by a Francie Brady or a Pussy Braden. However, it will do quite nicely for a laugh or two while we await the appearance of McCabe's next major work. Perhaps, like Phildy Hackball's promised novel, it will have "plenty of shooting--and a shark!"

I have to admit, I've been a huge fan a Patrick McCabe's for quite some time. Now I'm not one of those folks you sometimes read here who is painful with their glorious heapings of praise on their favorite authors, but McCabe (to me anyway) has become something of a unique spark. Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING--please publish Music on Clinton Street in the US--please?) I have read by this man is magnificent. From the grim, bleak and hysterically funny Carn, through the utter magnificence of The Butcher Boy (perhaps my favorite book), through The Dead School and Breakfast on Pluto, there is not a single thing I can say against this man. Then he comes and slams home a wonderful short story collection with this book. Okay, I'm not going to get into particulars (as my glowing, glorifying praise might imply), but this a just a wonderful book. Everything, everyone, every story is perfect. There is nothing more to add, nothing to take away. Everything is pure, everything is as it should be. Is this book sad like many of his others? Yes. But there is a darker comedic edge herein. The best, the best, the best book availible this year. Start picking up Patrick McCabe. Here is a future Nobel Prize winner (wait and see!) Here is the grand glory of Irish writers. Here is the single best writer in the world. For all of you would-be and wannabe and actual writers out there who might stumble across this superfluous praise, pick this up, read it, then brood over the fact that you will never be able to quite match McCabe's ability. I did. It hurts and then you try harder. This book is honesty, it is the truth. (I understand that I'm adding on the the ultimate irrelevence of this review, but it is just that wonderful. How many books have you read recently that you just can't stop praising?)One side note: I hope McCabe doesn't write subsequent books under the heading of the fictitious author persona of this one. Not that I wouldn't gobble it up, but simply that it would be difficult to provoke the same passion for a place we've been before.