Francie Brady back for warped trip down memory lane
FRANK is now the name that Francie ‘The Butcher Boy’ Brady goes by, in case you hadn’t heard. Locked away in Dundrum’s ‘Fizzbag Mansions’ ever since that whole hoo-ha with Mrs Nugent all those decades ago, Frank is reflecting on times past as well as what might be on the horizon at the age of sixty-something.
Mind you, he doesn’t quite have all of every day to be ambling down memory lane. He is editor-in-chief and principal content writer for The Big Yaroo, an in-house magazine that he produces with fervent discipline, the publication in many ways acting as a gymnasium for his feverishly active imagination and wandering thoughts.
Mortality, you see, is now facing Frank, the sins and salvations of yesteryear piling up in his conscience as the yawning void of death also begins to breathe upon him. His beloved Uncle Alo, a superhero figure to a boy — a man — still obsessed with comic books, died alone with no one to hold his hand.
His mother and father both passed away at Easter, the same holiday that he has earmarked for the printing of the last ever edition of The Big Yaroo before he makes his daring Dickie Attenborough-like escape from Fizzbag Mansions.
Frank is confident of pulling this off and perhaps making it across to Portrane, where relocated former co-habitants are enjoying the life of Reilly in what is by comparison “a holiday camp”. It means he’s been left behind with the likes of the dastardly Corrigan the Scuttler, and the Professor, who in one crushing anecdote relates his own emotional impoverishment and that of Irish society when love was offered to him in New York.
The tenderness he receives from Mrs Beacon (who, annoyingly, is referred to as “Mary” half the time) is an all-too-rare gossamer of Frank’s mother’s love.
Clones author Pat McCabe’s revisit to his most famous character is something of a tough nut to crack open because it can appear to hold the truth of scenes and settings at arm’s length.
We know that Frank’s mind was warped to begin with, and the evidence on show is that his time incarcerated in psychiatric institutional care has probably added to this, meaning the things he is continually reflecting on are pierced from indirect angles. Did they really happen at all, or is Francie still spoofing away all these years later?
The character is floating in a similar space to that of The Butcher Boy, that Booker-nominated titan of Irish fiction that one could argue paved the way for the black comi-tragic delights of Kevin Barry, Lisa McInerney and Nicole Flattery. We’re 27 years on from that title’s release and the punch that Francie Brady’s presence gave popular culture here (not least in Neil Jordan’s riotous 1997 film adaptation), though. The voice and its tangled prism of the sinister and the vulnerable are still there to be enjoyed as are the thematic interrogations, but a little more forward motion from Francie himself would’ve been interesting.
Ultimately, this is a frustrating and circular novel that at times feels too constricted by its ultra-famous first-person protagonist.