Breakfast on Pluto - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330445073 ISBN 13: 9780330445078

Publisher: Picador, 2006

Synopsis

Set in Ireland in the1970s, Breakfast on Pluto follows the exploits of Patrick “Pussy” Braden, an endearing but deceptively tough young man. Abandoned as a baby in his small Irish hometown and aware from a very early age that he is different, Patrick survives this harsh environment with the aid of his wit, charm and a sweet refusal to let anyone or anything change who he is. This is a surreal and magical tale, a funny, moving and poignant rites of passage novel. It is also a vivid and unsettling comment on the human price paid in the cultural and political climate of Ireland at that time.

'Wild, hilarious, merciless and fiendishly clever' Independent on Sunday

'He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books . . . dissect life's miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel' The Times

'It finds humour in places that other writers are afraid to look for it' Sunday Telegraph

'This is a savagely funny and authentically tragic novel of an Ireland in unhappy transition and beneath McCabe's perfectly delivered black comedy lies an angry heart' GQ

About this title

Review:

Patrick McCabe hit paydirt with his third novel The Butcher Boy, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism". In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also Booker-shortlisted, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate; ventriloquising perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the fourth form, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story, and as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. -- Alan Stewart

Review:

"'Wild, hilarious, merciless and fiendishly clever' Independent on Sunday 'He is the fortunate possessor of a save and unfettered imagination; his books... dissect life's miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel' The Times 'It finds humour in places that other writers are afraid to look for it' Sunday Telegraph 'This is a savagely funny and authentically tragic novel of an Ireland in unhappy transition and beneath McCabe's perfectly delivered black comedy lies an angry heart' GQ"

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0330445073
• ISBN 13: 9780330445078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208