Call Me The Breeze [Paperback]

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

Three examples: what was his rival Johnston's "Cyclops" thriller all about? Jimmy alludes to its contents in a sentence but given his jealousy towards his plagiarising mentor, why not elaborate? The stint in Mountjoy takes a few pages--whole years go by, with little from his incarceration to influence the rest of the novel, except to mark time, I suppose, and speed up the chronology. I found it curious that the narrative voice went into 3rd person briefly around pg. 296, and I hoped that--late in the game--this portended a fresh angle, but the end dribbles out into a series of dissipated conclusions, none of them that surprising given the unrelenting dreariness of the story.

Compared to noteworthy recent Irish fiction from the northern regions treating similar themes and situations--as disparate as John McGahern (By the Lake), Colin Bateman (Cycle of Violence and Divorcing Jack), Glenn Patterson (Burning Your Own and Number 5), Robert McLiam Wilson (Eureka Street and Ripley Bogle) and Niall Griffith (A Welsh version--in Sheepshagger), Mc Cabe's tale of inflatable dolls, IRA thugs, ennui, drugs, and autodidacts seems tired and exhausted.