Customer Reviews

The Butcher Boy

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Somewhat surprised that so many of the comments here are negative. Maybe Francie's "voice" in the book doesn't speak to everyone, but it spoke to me like no other book I've read (corny as this might sound to some of you) since I read "Catcher in the Rye" as a young man. I did wonder after reading this book how it would translate, whether it would find an audience outside Ireland, whether somebody in, say, America or England would actually "get" this book. On reading some of these comments it seems like many just didn't get it. Of course it's a completely subjective thing and the last thing I'm going to tell you is that you're all you're wrong if you hated the book. But, and I find it very difficult to describe exactly how I feel about this book, I grew up in a town like Francie, and what McCabe has captured in this, what he understands more than anyone else I've ever read, is that dark, surreal side of the rural Irish psyche. As I read it I felt like I was discovering a voice I'd always been searching for, hearing a story I always wanted told and one I understood implicitly. And it was a great release.

To me this is a more important book than anything else that has come out of Ireland in the last 15/20 years...including stuff most people readily lap up like Roddy Doyle and Frank McCourt (though they are talented writers). That's why I feel strongly about seeing it dismissed as rubbish by some of the other reviewers here. To me this astonishing book is McCabe's best work, better than Breakfast on Pluto which gets a 5 star rating on this site..though I would also wholeheartedly recommend The Dead School.

Francie Brady is mad, first a little, then a lot, and he is taking you with him. The claustrophobic narrative (you can't for a moment get away from Francie) creates pity, terror and exasperated laughter in the reader.

Francie, the only child of a mean-drunk father and a slovenly, barely sane mother keeps his sanity by his all-encompassing friendship with Joe Mullen. He and Joe "mess around," do all the boyish things and bond as blood brothers. But as Francie's oddities increase, Joe pulls away from him. Francie shatters. From the very beginning, there is a tethered violence in Francie; as he descends into madness, his terrifying ferocity is unleashed.

Mr. McCabe plays with us readers very well by putting us in Francie's lightning-quick mind and never letting us out. Francie is exhausting, humorous and the most Attention Deficient child you will ever meet. I felt a terrible sorrow for Francie, so much so I wanted to command events. I wanted to say "Not. One. More. Bad. Thing!" The child has had enough horrible things happen to him! But Mr. McCabe had his own story to tell.

A gripping, marvelous, draining, exhilarating, tale. I'll never forget Francie!
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

Set is a rural Irish town in the early 1960s, The Butcher Boy is a beautiful and disturbing novel that tells the tale of "the incredible Francie Brady," a lonely Irish teenager who has, at best, a tenuous grasp on reality.

A series of crushing personal loses, are causing Francie to slowly descend into madness, into the world of the true psychopath. In an irrational attempt to fix blame on someone for the cruelties which have befallen him, Francie makes a local woman, Mrs. Nugent, the target of his scathing and sardonic wit, his growing anger, and finally, his shocking violence. This is a tale of the surrealistic space that lies between sanity and insanity and Francie is the mythical changeling.

Despite its exceptionally depressing subject matter, The Butcher Boy is darkly comic and Francie's resilient, callous and savage first-person narrative, devoid of much traditional punctuation, impels the reader at a breakneck speed. Francie gives nicknames to people, places and things and speaks in his own brand of Irish slang. The book is a little claustrophobic in feel because we observe Francie's descent into madness from the inside, without realizing that we are going there. We unwittingly embrace his warped point of view and are able to sympathize with him and weep for him even though we absolutely cannot condone what he does. It's a rather hallucinatory novel, a patchwork-quilt of B-movie aliens, comic strip logic and even visions of the Virgin Mary. It's a wild ride between sentimentality and the Grand Guignol; a place where real and rational explanations of the world simply aren't good enough.

Although this is an Irish novel, you won't find any politics in this book. The Butcher Boy is set in a distant, apolitical Ireland of the past, all to the good. Politics would only confuse the issues here. Francie's world in an ambiguous, ambivalent one of religious fanaticism and Irish mysticism, two things that no doubt contribute to Francie's deteriorating mental state.

The ending of the book is a little surprising and is the only reason I gave this book four stars instead of five. It really doesn't seem in keeping with the character of Francie that McCabe worked so diligently to build. I felt a little let down, a little out of place.

But make no mistake, The Butcher Boy is a highly disturbing book. It is an intimate look at a mind-gone-wrong, but it is extremely well-written and highly original. There are no cookie-cutter characters or plot lines here. As the Virgin Mary says to Francie, "Don't go bothering your head about it. The world goes one way and we go another." That is certainly true for The Butcher Boy as well.

So "The Butcher Boy" offers nothing new? OK, name one other book that traces the psychological workings of a young boy who turns into a murderer. And while we're at it, name another book that pulls it off with the skill and narrative voice of McCabe. Really, if you're looking for gore and shock, find a highway accident. The heart-breaking tragedy of "Butcher Boy" is that of a lost childhood. If we've no ability to mourn the death of childhood--as it seems some of the reviewers below have--then our society truly is hopelessly lost in a morass of violence, apathy, and the endless quest of cheap thrills. So read your meaningless Stephen King. Read your vapid Bret Easton Ellis. But please, don't point your critical finger at true writers like McCabe.

As a stark raving looney myself (albeit a medicated one) I could understand Francie's deep obsessions and inability to grasp reality more than some. This book touched me deeply and the sometimes horrific, selfish, and often childish aspects of insanity are captured wonderfully. If you truly want to delve into mental illness trash your copies of Catcher and the Rye and read this. Obsession, paranoia, hallucinations, crushing despair... it's all in here and tossed about with the wicked humor that keeps us alive at times. I don't know if Mr. McCabe knew what he was tapping into but he did it successfully!

This is my first novel by Patrick McCabe and I find his use of language decieving until you get used to it; from then on it is astoundingly brilliant. His style of writing is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess, and The Butcher Boy is a mixture of both, a Clockwork Orange by Burgess and The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. If you want an insight into violent, disturbed youths turn to these novels and you wont be dissapointed.

Like Burgess' Clockwork Orange and Welsh's Trainspotting (the books not the movies) McCabe brings the reader inside the mind of a warped narrator with such convincing style and craft that the reader is left shuddering for days. The end has already happened in the beginning of the novel and the reader sees the why, the how, and especially the details of a boy's descent into black madness. Along the way, Mr McCabe offers a hilarious satire of small-town busybody Ireland. He truly is a descendent of Swift. The characters are real and accurate. He hits the reader on a number of levels. This book, mark my words, will be renown as a classic of modern literature for years to come. Europe's english language writers, such as McCabe and Irvine Welsh, are far greater writers than their american counterparts. Behold this book as an example to American writers. The style is here to stay

Commentators on the jacket of this book refer to Francie Brady as a psychopath or an abuse victim or something like that. Fortunately, "The Butcher Boy" is no such disease-of-the-week television special. If it were, it would not have gained the reputation it has now and those same commentators never would have read it. So there.

This is even more ironic than it sounds, because whatever Francie's character flaws (and they are plentiful), those commentators share at least one characteristic with the people of Francie's small Irish town. None of them really see him as himself - rather, they all jump to conclusions about the kid and therefore look askance at him even when he's trying to behave properly. Which, admittedly, he does only upon occasion.

So who is this kid, anyway? In the novel's first sentence he's reminiscing about a time he had to hide out by the river because of something he did to Mrs. Nugent. He seems a little unclear about how many decades have passed. And in some ways you don't need to know much more about him; this first sentence tells you that his behavior is at least problematic, possibly dangerous, and his mental process is such that he may or may not have a good grip on reality. Later on we learn that his mother is suicidal, his father alcoholic, he has only one friend to speak of, and pretty nearly everyone has been lying to him for quite a while about a great many things.

Clearly, if you're looking for an uplifting tale, you should go somewhere else. One of the things that makes "The Butcher Boy" worth your time is that Patrick McCabe makes a genuine and largely successful effort to get inside Francie's head. The narrative is first-person and in colloquial Irish language, and although the incidents are seldom pleasant, Francie's way of describing them can be very funny.

For example, he hallucinates from time to time - I told you his grip on reality isn't the strongest - about things like the Virgin Mary standing around in a meadow waiting to have a word with him. He sees this while at a reform school run by the Catholic Church, and there's a priest there who finds him and his visions quite arousing. Well, what would you do in a circumstance like that? Francie takes it all in stride, quickly figures out which saints the priest most wants to hear about, and pretends he saw them, too.

As for Mrs. Nugent - well, she does go so far as to refer to the entire Brady family as "pigs", which isn't nice at all. So Francie bugs the Nugents at home whenever he gets the chance, and at one point seeks to charge them a "pig toll tax" as they walk down the street. Cute. Then he invades their home when they're out and vandalizes it. Less cute. And things go downhill from there.

The thing is, as he describes his destruction of the Nugent house - and his harassment of his one friend Joe when he thinks Joe is growing distant - Francie speaks of it as if he were just having a lark. He understands perfectly well when Mr. Nugent gets angry, but he's not particularly angry himself. He does and says just as he pleases, however furious it makes the priests at school or his neighbors or anyone else. So you read "The Butcher Boy" on two levels at once. On the one hand, you can't believe that anyone would do what Francie does - it's just too outrageous for comprehension. On the other hand, you sort of admire him for his irrepressible pluck, which would be downright lovable if he weren't so cruel.

Hey, what do I know, Francie may be a certifiable psychopath. "The Butcher Boy" doesn't really read like that, though. Francie has feelings that can be, and often are, hurt. If I personally had to deal with a punk like this in real life, of course, I wouldn't care much about his feelings, but that's one of the functions of literature - to show us experiences we'd never have in the real world. Francie may lack empathy, but we don't.

Does he lack empathy? Probably. I said he can be hurt and he can certainly get angry, but although he's seldom surprised by other people's anger at him when he does something hurtful, he hasn't got a clue in advance as to what their reactions will be. Quite apart from the hallucinations, what plans he does make are totally unrealistic and he seldom follows them anyway. He understands the social rules and frequently promises himself that he will follow them, but it doesn't take much to knock him off track. Indeed, he's perfect as a butcher boy, which is not only the title of an Irish song that his mother sings, it's also the title of the job he takes.

Speaking of "The Butcher Boy", the song describes the life of Francie's mother pretty well, being about a girl who falls in love with the wrong young man. You can quickly guess that Francie himself is just such a young man to the nth degree, but this novel is surely one of the few works that tries to tell the traditional wronged-woman story from the wronging man's point of view without making excuses for him. True, for all his charm, you certainly wouldn't want to meet Francie in a dark alley. On the other hand, it's not like anyone else in town has much empathy for him either.

Does this pardon him? Ah, there's the question. And here's another - Can you empathize with someone who maybe doesn't deserve it? That, and not Francie's mental confusion, is the story here. I was left with the feeling that Francie may not be worth much, but the story is worth a great deal.

Benshlomo says, The wise man learns wisdom from the dust in the road.

Plot reviews and synopsis details abound through the various five star reviews. If you want a breakdown about what the book is about, then check there first. Instead I will cut to the chase and try to offer you a glimpse into what you may or may not like about the novel.

First off, this is a 'stream of conscious' type of book that places you right into the mind of a teenager in Ireland (though in truth it is really the narrator as an old man looking back to "when [he] was a young lad of twenty or thirty or forty years ago [when he] lived in a small town...". That opening line will tell you a lot about the book, considering the narrator is not even sure how long ago it was, or even how old he presumably is. There is no argument about it, this is a difficult book to read. Sentence fragments and run-ons are everywhere, there is a heavy lack of punctuation (no quotation marks anyplace), and the topic can change 180 degrees in the same (presumably) sentence. You have to be willing to give the book your time if you want to enjoy it, and trust me, it is worth it.

As many reviews point out, the book is dark and morbid. Watching Francie fall into a pit of helplessness and despair makes you hope he realizes his actions, but that downward spiral is far to consuming. What we have here is a study of the trials and paths that the criminally insane take. Fancie is a sociopath, delusional, perhaps even schizophrenic. If this is something that piques your interest, then it may very well fit your tastes.

McCabe does not hold anything back in his narration and I would not be surprised to see people who are offended by this book. The people (women especially) in the town are portrayed as nitwits, naive, and just plain dumb. The kid's dad is a drunk, his mother strung-out, his uncle a fake, and the priests pedophiles (well, one main priest anyway, but the rest are still degraded and make your skin crawl with ickyness). Fortunately, Irish politics does not show up in any major ways, which is nice. That topic has been beat to death, several times. Instead McCabe focuses on the individual and humanity. He questions our own actions through the actions of Francie. And it is hard not to feel pity, maybe even like the kid a bit and root for him. He loses his parents, his role models, and his best friend even abandons him for his worst enemies (the Nugents). Yet we are still disgusted by him. In the back of our minds we know he has gone of the deep end, and we know where it is leading and will end, but you still can't help that spark of not wanting to realize it.

McCabe set out to engage the reader with this work. If you are willing to give him the time to read the work in the same way he took the time to offer it, you will be pleasantly surprised. This is not for the feint of heart, nor, may I dare say, for the casual reader. The plot does tend to drag on at times (which intends to show that this was not an instant change in Francie, but rather a slow moving infection). Most of the reviews that offered low scores comment on that very fact--that they had to stop 1/3 or 1/2 through the book because it bogged down. That may be true. More than once I had to stop and wonder if I would make it through, but it was well worth it. This book is much more of a character study and a look at insanity than a book with action, mysteries, frightening scares, or romance. It is about me; it is about you; it is the criminally insane; it is about humanity. And we all know what infections humanity carries with it.

Mr. McCabe captured a time in irish history that affected an entire generation that remains today.

Francie Brady is an amazing character he's sarcastic, hysterical, witty with a vivid imagination. You cant help but feel that he is a hero in a twisted sense.

In reality all the trouble started with him just trying to defend his family. Ironically enough he's taking ownership over his dysfunctional parents but obviously doing it in the wrong manner.

He is proof of how easily you can tarnish your reputation in a small town, immediate family or community at such a young age and never be forgiven. After being treated like trouble many of us find ourselves falling into an unsuspected pattern. He shows how people love to hang on to the bad things but seem to forget anything that is good.