Winterwood
by Patrick McCabe
Bloomsbury, HK$208
Patrick McCabe made his name on an Irish literary scene replete with sentimental novels that idealise traditional life and warn against the potentially devastating impact of economic development and urbanisation. Against the backdrop of scepticism about Ireland's rapid gentrification McCabe's fiction has challenged the mythology surrounding the Irish countryside by focusing on what he calls 'the secret lives of small towns'.
Establishing himself as one of Ireland's foremost contemporary writers with 1992's The Butcher Boy, McCabe's novels focus on the gritty aspects of rural life that have been neglected by a modern Ireland that has always shown great reverence towards the idea of 'simpler times'. His novels often shock - The Butcher Boy is the story of a homicidal schoolchild and Breakfast on Pluto is narrated from the perspective of a transgendered prostitute - chronicling the activities of social misfits in deceptively banal rural settings.
And so it is with Winterwood, McCabe's latest offering, narrated by the unreliable Redmond Hatch, a journalist from Slievenageeha Mountain, a largely deserted mountain plain, who returns to his home town on assignment to write about mythology and folklore in 1980s Ireland.
Hatch's dispatches paint a typically idealised portrait of village culture and focus in particular on one mountain resident, Ned Strange, a freckled old musician whose ceilidhs - traditional Irish gatherings with music, dancing and storytelling - are always well attended by the local population and embody everything about Irish tradition that is under threat of extinction.