This is a remarkable novel; it is written in prose of bleak, unadorned beauty, closely matching the world in which the narrative takes place, with the sort of hair-raising plot which keeps you up all night wondering how it will end.
It is set on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border in the north of Ireland in 1883. It is full of the bitterness of contemporary politics and family feuds. Beth, a Catholic, is the stepdaughter of Billy Winters, a Protestant landowner. She comes straight out of nineteenth-century fiction: beautiful, intelligent, well read, passionate, just as her stepfather is bigoted, drunken, duplicitous and oddly charming. All around them are the forces that will shape twentieth-century Ireland — ambitious Catholic clergy, ruthless revolutionaries, a sense of Protestant privilege. Neighbours watch each other and bear dark grudges; the landscape itself becomes a significant force in the book, lakeland, bogland, soft hills. The sense of menace, of impending doom, of terrible darkness and hatred is all-pervasive. It would make a superb film. This neglected masterpiece deserves to be much better known.
Eugene McCabe was born in Glasgow, but has lived most of his life on a farm close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. His play King of the Castle (1964) is a classic of the contemporary Irish theatre. His shorter fiction is collected in Christ in the Fields (1993). He also published a fiction The Love of Sisters (2009).
Age in year of publication: sixty-two.
Patrick McCabe 1955–
1992 The Butcher Boy
This is a relentless and flawless version of grief and madness. It is told in the first person by one Francie Brady, whose mind moves at enormous speed and with considerable logic. He watches the small Irish town he inhabits, the coming and going of a chorus of disapproving housewives, his father, his mother, the doctor, the priest, his friend Joe, a local dog and, most of all, Mrs Nugent and her son Philip. He makes a number of escapes — to Dublin, to a seaside resort, to a Borstal, to a mental hospital. He finds work in the local slaughterhouse. He deals with his mother’s madness and death and his father’s drinking as though they are normal parts of his experience.
There is an extraordinary amount of pain at the core of the book, and this is made most clear when Francie glosses over it, laughs when he should be crying. He is obsessed with comic books and chocolate bars and pigs and the activities of young Philip Nugent as ways of avoiding what is happening in his own life. He is abandoned by his friend Joe. The account of his abuse by a priest in Borstal is superbly done. McCabe’s version of Francie’s psychology, and his observation of town life, are comic; using the clarity of Francie’s voice and dramatizing with great skill the inevitable consequences of his manic condition, the novel invents its own world and its own set of rules, and remains deeply convincing.
Patrick McCabe was born in County Monaghan in Ireland and lives in Sligo. His other novels include Carn (1989), The Dead School (1995), Breakfast on Pluto (1998), Winterwood (2006) and The Holy City (2009). Both The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were made into films by Neil Jordan.
Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.
Cormac McCarthy 1935–
1985 Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy’s vision is dark, apocalyptic and violent. His language takes its bearings from the Old Testament, the Joyce of Ulysses and William Faulkner; his syntax is nervous, clotted, he uses short sentences, and then immense, long, curling sentences, like an old preacher. He moves from the vernacular to a high literary style. He mainly writes about men.
Blood Meridian is the book where all his obsessions and his genius as a stylist are most apparent. It tells the story of a group of men in possession of guns and horses on the Texas — Mexico border in the 1840s. McCarthy’s Wild West is a barren, hostile landscape; killing is both whim and passion, the book is full of scalpings and hangings, whole villages destroyed, uneasy alliances, further scalpings, dead babies hanging upside down from trees. His group of misfits roam like wild, bloodthirsty animals. His version of the American past as a sort of hell has almost no precedent in American narrative; his refusal to offer meaning and moral shape to his story makes this novel, and his other work, original and disturbing.
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island but was brought up in Knoxville, Tennessee. He lives in El Paso, Texas. Child of God (1973), an account of a necrophiliac on the rampage, is his most savage and disturbing book. All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998) are labelled ‘The Border Trilogy’. He followed these with No Country For Old Men (2005) filmed in 2007 and The Road (2006) which won a Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 2009.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Mary McCarthy 1912–1989
1963 The Group
This novel caused a sensation when first published because of its frank descriptions, not so much of sex itself, but of all the contraceptive devices, unguents and general embarrassments that go with it — the bad breath, strange noises, teeth jarring and fiddly birth control methods that coupling requires. Read over thirty years later, the novel is still a diverting tribute to such fumblings.
The group consists of seven upper-middle-class women, Vassar educated, products of everything freedom and money can buy — and even in 1933, when the novel begins, this was considerable. These young women were among the first to benefit from advances in medicine, contraception, education and equality of opportunity. With pitiless wit and a caustic eye, Mary McCarthy shows how the progress of science elevated its voice to entrap them again. The seven friends, Polly, Pokey, Libby, Kay, Dottie, Priss and Helena, founder on the rock of bad judgement, sadistic men and useless doctors and pundits, always shakily clinging to a longing for work, love and marriage.
Mary McCarthy provides an unusual and immensely readable account of the early adult lives of certain young women engaged in life and the practicalities of sex. The Group does a prescient and satirical demolition job on those theoretical bullies who are always telling women what to do, and think — and who met their match in Mary McCarthy.
Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle and lived in Paris and the USA. Other notable novels are The Company She Keeps (1942) and The Groves of Academe (1952).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Carson McCullers 1917–1967
1951 The Ballad of the Sad Café
This short novel tells a story of love. And so it is a ballad, but also an American Gothic opera — a tragi-comic Carmen, a poor white Porgy and Bess. McCullers’s small Southern town is the kind where there is absolutely nothing to do except eat mashed rutabagas, collard greens and the occasional pig, and keep a watchful eye on your neighbour. Here lives Amelia, a six-foot-two, hairy sort of woman, clever at making money, doctoring, and distilling the best liquor in town. When her Cousin Lymon turns up — a malicious four-foot hunchback — she takes a great passion for him, which is incomprehensible but eternally fascinating to the folk who gather every night in the café Cousin Lymon opens in a store. When Cousin Lymon falls in love with the one man most likely to cause Amelia pain, the resolution of these passionate difficulties sees the lights in the café dim and the stage fall empty, Amelia’s lament lingering in the air.