Breakfast on Pluto [Hardcover]

Patrick McCabe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1998

Patrick McCabe, already acclaimed as one of the most gifted Irish novelist writing today, is increasingly being recognized internationally as a writer of true literary stature, with an ever-growing popular readership.

Breakfast on Pluto, his lyrical and haunting new novel, became a number one bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. It was the sole Irish novel to be so honored, and McCabe is that rare writer who has had his work twice nominated, having been previously selected in 1992 for his classic novel The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize, was recently released as a major motion picture, and joined Breakfast on Pluto on the Irish bestseller lists.

With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutty survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the Troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain.

As Breakfast on Pluto opens, her ladyship, resplendent in housecoat and head scarf, reclines in Kilburn, London, writing her story for the elusive psychiatrist Dr. Terence, paring her fingernails as she reawakens the truth behind her life and the chaos of long-ago days in a city filled with hatred. Twenty years ago, she escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother, Whisker--prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney--and her mad household (endless doorstep babas!), to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb among the flotsam and jetsam who fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus ("You want love? That what you want, orphaned boy without a home? Then die for it! Die! Die, sweet Irish!). But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy's existence. It is the 1970s, and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder.

Brilliant, startling, profound, and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines lightness and darkness, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness, and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long, long after the initial impression.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Patrick McCabe hit pay dirt with his third novel, The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the 1992 Booker Prize, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism." In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also on the Booker shortlist, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate, mimicking perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the age of 14, 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; 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

From Publishers Weekly

McCabe is a master ventriloquist. In The Butcher Boy he projects the voice of a brash, fast-talking, murderous boy in order to tell a story of divisive tension in a small Irish town. In The Dead School the liberalization of modern Dublin came to readers in the voice of a doddering headmaster. Here, in this Booker Prize finalist, McCabe walks far out on a limb: in the voice of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a male transvestite fathered by a priest and brought up by foster parents, he tells of life in a violent Irish border town in the early 1970s and an exiled existence in London. (Imagine Ru Paul discoursing on "the Troubles" over a top-40 soundtrack.) Of course, they are more Pussy's troubles than his countrymen's, but Pussy is perhaps the most unabashed narrator in Irish writing since Beckett's Malone. He's nothing if not full of style: "And who was it within my darkened cellbox upon whom mine eyes did gladly fall as there I sat sky-high a-twiddle, ringed around by stars and planets?" Pussy's tale, brief but never boring, is structured as the story told to his doctor in 56 tiny chapters with theatrical asides. Stigmatized as the bastard son of the town priest whose "starched vestments... were partly responsible for his son's attraction to the airy apparel of the opposite sex," Pussy flees to England, where his transvestitism looks suspiciously like a disguise (his old IRA connections are of no help in this regard) as he moves bout Picadilly Circus, picking up men, falling in love and fantasizing various bombing schemes to avenge his own sufferings and that of his down-and-out friends?Charlie, who falls prey to drink, and Irwin, killed by the IRA for informing. Comically self-absorbed, Pussy is nonetheless charming company, and McCabe manages adroitly to paint a tender portrait of lives destined to be lost to history?apolitical folk welcome neither in Catholic Ireland nor in the U.K. while the sectarian war rages on. A recently penned preface reveals the author's hope that this time is over and that a new tolerance of difference will take hold. (Dec.) FYI: The title comes from a 1969 chart-making song in the U.K.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060193409
• ISBN-13: 978-0060193409
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #717,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darling Pussy..., July 30, 2005

By 

Stephanie A. Rowe (Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breakfast on Pluto: A Novel (Paperback)

I just finished this book, and while I don't often write reviews, I felt inclined to do so upon reading so many negative ones. Simply stated, this book was wonderful. Utterly captivating in its hilarity, as much as its anguish. Pussy Braden will sweep you up and carry you off. Her journey is devastating, yet eternally optimistic as she searches for the mother she never had, yet always yearned for, and dreams up vengeful plots against the father that never wanted her. You may just fall in love with her along the way...I know I did.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I almost knew my own name, January 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Breakfast on Pluto (Hardcover)

Once in a long while of hoping, wishing, weeping and praying does a book like this come along. Pardon me while I gush, but this book is quite simply one of the best first person narratives I have ever read, for one simple reason. I could actually hear our Puss' voice ringing inside my head, bouncing off my own cochlea. This in not only a nifty party trick my friends, but also an indication of some of the bravest, fiercest compassion and empathy put to good use I have ever had the pleasure to witness. It constitutes as redefinition of narrative "voice" and the extraordinary use to which it can be put. Inversions, run on sentences, horrifyingly extended metaphors, a grammarians nightmare. To hell with the sanctity of the English language in case there ever was any. To spare you all a worthless plot and to give any encouragement (or as the French say...encouragement) to those of you desperately searching for plot events let me say, release yourself from your struggle. The point of this book is to experience, yea bathe, in someone elses psyche for a while. And not the kind of repetitive, dull, mortifying psyche of say "Strange Interlude" but the psyche of a lively, severly troubled, struggling, unloved young person who none the less has learned somehow to live in a world that quite specifically denies his right to exist. This book goes beyond wordsmithing (ach, hateful word, get thee behind me wordsmiths) and moves into the exalted place of those who have created entire universes that draw in distract trouble traumatize and inspire. Thanks to the author for making my bookreading life worthwhile. Again. A Political Sidenote: I recommend picking up the Butcher Boy in case this book hasn't taught you enough about what happens to the unloved. A responsible sidenote: The ending is a little weak. I doesn't ruin everything, it just kind of makes you shrug and say "Hmnh" or some such unidentifiable syllable.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Pussy"....the perfect metaphor for a troubled Ireland, February 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Breakfast on Pluto (Hardcover)

Patrick McCabe may have hit pay dirt with "The Butcher Boy", but he has produced a masterpiece with "Breakfast On Pluto". In the character of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, McCabe has found the perfect metaphor for a troubled Ireland. Just as the Irish struggle to define their identity in a climate of political strife and conflict, Pussy yearns to be reunited with his mother (a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor) but seethes with hatred and plots revenge on his father (no pun intended) whose identity remains a secret to all but the reader. Like his country, Pussy is sexually and emotionally in no man's land. His life as a transvestite, who does smashing impersonations of 60s English divas Dusty Springfield and Lulu, mirrors the pain and confusion of the times. McCabe's novel is a collage of incidents and minor sequences which flash back and forth in time to produce a criss cross matisse of images which somehow hang together. Short bursts of shocking violence alternate with dreamy ruminations of the past (mostly about Pussy's origins). As a satirist, McCabe's command of the genre shines through the use of a rapid fire tongue-in-cheek style to great effect. "Breakfast On Pluto" is truly deserving of its Booker Prize nomination. It is a massive literary achievement and will be enjoyed by all who read to be entertained and more !