The Butcher Boy

I didn’t really enjoy The Butcher Boy.  I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I really struggled to get into the book.  It’s not bad, as such, just difficult to get the hang of.  I think some of it has to do with Patrick McCabe’s style.  It’s a stream of consciousness narrative with a main character who fairly awful for most of the book and I was reading it in half hours snatched during lunch breaks and before going to sleep at night.

The Butcher Boy tells the story of Fancie Brady, a boy growing up in an unnamed Irish town an unspecified period of time ago.  From the start he’s utterly unknowable and remote.  He’s the kind of boy that my mum would have disapproved of me hanging out with when I was ten; he and his best friend spend most of their time scaring chickens and shouting at fish.  There’s clearly not much to do for fun in their town, so when the middle class Nugent family move there the boys become obsessed with their son Philip.  When the friendship goes south after a comic stealing incident, Joe grows up and straightens while Francie continues on with his campaign against the Nugents.  After a stint in a priest run reform school (complete with sexual abuse) and a mental institute, Francie realises that Joe has out grown him and, so, murders Mrs Nugent.  These aren’t really spoilers; most of it is given away on the first page.

I think part of the reason that I didn’t like the book is that Francie is a dick.  His personality flaws may actually just be symptoms of a mental illness, but it’s fairly uncomfortable to spend 200-odd pages in his company.  He persecutes the (admittedly snobby) Nugents for next to know reason and has no concept of how deeply unhappy and unwell his mother is.  It would be much nicer if he showed any empathy for anyone throughout the entirety of the novel, and make him a character much easier to empathise with.  Even the sexual abuse couldn’t tug at my heart strings.  It felt very clichéd and even a little lazy of McCabe to have paedophilic priests.

I did, however, like the ending of the book.  There are spoilers here.  Francie tells the story of how he meets his best friend Joe as a young child, hacking away at a patch of ice in the street.  Francie joins him and they form a fast friendship that last years.  Decades later, in his mental hospital, Francie meets another man, while he is hacking away at ice in the yard.  It’s nice and cyclical and, even if I don’t particularly like him, I like that Francie has a chance at a happy ending.

Overall, I’m not sure I got this book completely.  I can certainly see why it was on The List; it’s different and pretty original and I’m sure if I’d have read it at a different time when I was able to get into it, I’d have loved it.  It’s a shame, because I do love stories about murderers and I was so looking forward to this one.  Maybe it’s another case of my expectations being far too high for the book to have a chance to deliver on them.  And it’s a pity, but it was probably pretty inevitable that I was going to be let down by The Butcher Boy.

My next read is Georges Perec’s Things.