Call Me the Breeze: A Novel [Paperback]

Patrick McCabe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2004

With T. S. Eliot's words as his guide, Joey Tallon embarks on a journey toward enlightenment in the troubling psychedelic-gone-wrong atmosphere of the late 1970s. A man deranged by desire, and longing for belonging, Tallon searches for his"place of peace" -- a spiritual landscape located somewhere between his small town in Northern Ireland and Iowa ... and maybe between heaven and hell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McCabe's deliciously warped wit is razor-sharp as ever in his latest book (titled after an old J.J. Cale song), which reads alternately like an acid-induced reverie and the naive ramblings of a man trapped between art and reality. Charged with kidnapping and assault, Joey Tallon is sentenced to do time in Mountjoy prison (or "The Joy," as it is ironically called), a fate not much worse than staying in his cramped trailer in Scotsfield, a small border town plagued by violence in 1970s Northern Ireland. While locked up, Joey takes to reading and becomes a founding member of the prison's first literary society. While some of the convicts take a stab at poetry, Joey keeps a diary, which he later reads, "secretly hoping to stumble upon a novel." Newly obsessed with outlandish film projects after his release and still eager to publish a novel, Joey becomes delusional, seeking (unsuccessfully) to involve pop icons like Joni Mitchell, Madonna and Bono in his artistic endeavors and setting himself up as the laughingstock of Scotsfield. Under the spell of his misguided optimism, Joey unwittingly reveals too many secrets about events related to the Troubles, many of which point to the sinister politician Boyle Henry and his minions. Joey has his own share of skeletons in the closet, including some positively Oedipal encounters with a blow-up doll named for his father's long-dead mistress. His creative efforts bury him deeper in a world of illusion, and he continues to pine for his muse, the lovely Jacy, a local girl who may just be a figment of his imagination. McCabe (author of Booker Prize finalists The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto) deftly patches together episodes of Joey's peculiar life using diary excerpts as well as letters and notes from film shoots, yet turns the traditional epistolary novel on its head. What results is the bone-chilling account of a would-be writer who collides with fiction because he takes it too seriously. McCabe is happily not at risk of doing the same, allowing his trademark humor and crafty Irish colloquialisms to leaven even the darkest of scenes.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Reviewing his life through diaries, notes, and fictions, Joey Tallon has quite a tale to tell. It's the end of the 1960s--that is, the mid-1970s--in Scotsfield, a small border town in Northern Ireland. A bartender and part-time roadie, Joey is overweight, obsessed with both steak-and-kidney pies and Jacy, his "California girl," with whom he dreams of escaping to America. But while Joey is a would-be flower child, gobbling acid along with his pies and pints, he is out of place among the local toughs and Provos (Provisional IRA) and the milieu of violence that taints the town. After surviving a bombing, Joey transforms into a Mohawk-sporting, would-be Travis Bickle (of Taxi Driver) and commits a crime that lands him in prison. Rehabilitated by a nurturing warden, his post-prison career leads him to try teaching, writing, film, and even politics. It may be a new Ireland, but when he revisits Scotsfield's buried past in a too-truthful film, Joey learns the past is not buried very deep. McCabe's latest--he is also the author of Emerald Germs of Ireland (2001)--is a rollicking tragicomedy, brilliantly cast. Joey, with his physical girth, intellectual myopia, and injured indignation, could be the Irish cousin of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces (1980). Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (November 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060523891
• ISBN-13: 978-0060523893
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,958,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Look out, James Joyce, there's a new kid in town.", November 30, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Call Me the Breeze (Hardcover)

In his newest and most complex novel to date, McCabe gives the reader another disturbed young main character, trying to survive alone in a hostile world. Joseph Mary Tallon, the main character here, uses his personal journal to reveal his life in a small town on the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The journals begin in 1976, with brief narratives about a Provo murder and a suicide, suddenly shifting without transition to Joey's revelations about The Seeker, a deceased friend with whom he discussed Carlos Castaneda and listened to Santana. Again without transition, he describes his long-time relationship with someone named Mona, with whom he lives in a trailer at a sometime gypsy camp, though we also discover that he worships someone named Jacy from afar.

Because Joey does not always explain background or identify characters, the reader is not always sure who the characters are, their roles in his life, or how events are connected. He is "scattered," shifting quickly from Provo activity, to a priest's plan for a peace rally, and to his own search for nirvana, all of which keep the reader constantly energized and involved in deciding what is real and what is fantasy. Clearly unstable, he is an unreliable narrator who tells us about the world from his very limited perspective.

Unlike McCabe's earlier characters, Joey is intellectually curious, reading Hesse, T.S. Eliot, Gogol, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, and he is a compulsive writer. Despite his delusions, and his impulsive actions, resulting at one point in a jail sentence of several years, he achieves considerable success, writing stories, plays, screenplays, and even a novel. This allows McCabe to expand his scope beyond that of dramatic plot twists to show how one becomes a writer, how writing attempts to bring order to the world, and how writing, ultimately, can be misunderstood. When Joey eventually uses his writing in a bid for public office, the sympathetic reader roots for his success.

Fully-developed and fascinating, Joey, like earlier McCabe "heroes," is a prisoner of circumstance and victim of fate. Through him, McCabe illustrates T.S. Eliot's point that "the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." By the time Joey and the reader have reached the end of this circular journey of exploration, both will have been on a wild ride in which dreams collide with realities, hopes bloom and are crushed in defeat, and tragedies exist within triumphs. Enlightenment, as we see here, sometimes comes at a huge cost. Mary Whipple

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Call this a snooze, June 3, 2004

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Call Me the Breeze (Hardcover)

McCabe's best novels, "Butcher Boy" and "Breakfast on Pluto," managed to convince you that, despite the melodramatic and even ridiculous predicaments that the twisted cartoonish narrators were placed in by their author, a true and distinctive voice expressed his tormented view of Ireland. In "CMTB," the Charlie Manson-meets-Nikolai Gogol, Steppenwolf-Tarantino influences would have made for a decent novella, but nothing can sustain a reader faced with hundreds of pages of snippets from his briefly productive but ultimately solipsistic life. While a couple of the treatments he gives are engrossing on their own, and show how the hundreds of pages have been distilled into genuinely engrossing condensations, the effort expected of a reader to sift through so much dross to find the diamond is likely to discourage all but a McC fan who simply must read his every effort. This rivalled "The Dead School" for tedium, which is unfortunate given the dramatic potential of that and this book.
Even Ardal O'Hanlon's "Knick Knack Paddy Whack,"a first-time effort I found remaindered, offered as much fireworks. For a novelist of McCabe's proven abilities, "CMTB" is slacking off.
If, as the blurb tells us, it took five years to write, perhaps he should take ten per novel, like his fellow Border craftsman John McGahern. Nothing's shocking or compelling this go around.

Three examples: what was his rival Johnston's "Cyclops" thriller all about? Jimmy alludes to its contents in a sentence but given his jealousy towards his plagiarising mentor, why not elaborate? The stint in Mountjoy takes a few pages--whole years go by, with little from his incarceration to influence the rest of the novel, except to mark time, I suppose, and speed up the chronology. I found it curious that the narrative voice went into 3rd person briefly around pg. 296, and I hoped that--late in the game--this portended a fresh angle, but the end dribbles out into a series of dissipated conclusions, none of them that surprising given the unrelenting dreariness of the story.

Compared to noteworthy recent Irish fiction from the northern regions treating similar themes and situations--as disparate as John McGahern (By the Lake), Colin Bateman (Cycle of Violence and Divorcing Jack), Glenn Patterson (Burning Your Own and Number 5), Robert McLiam Wilson (Eureka Street and Ripley Bogle) and Niall Griffith (A Welsh version--in Sheepshagger), Mc Cabe's tale of inflatable dolls, IRA thugs, ennui, drugs, and autodidacts seems tired and exhausted.

4.0 out of 5 stars Overblown and rambling at times but Joey is a character who will stay with you, July 15, 2011

By 

Leven1 (West Lothian) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Call Me the Breeze : A Novel (Paperback)

An enthralling but at times dragging account of the life or Joey Tallon. The story is set in a fictional small Irish border town initially during the 1970s and the height of the troubles but eventually takes in a 30 year period.

Joey is a fantasist and obessive and although he means well he seems to make a mess of everything he touches but somehow bumbles along and has his fair share of good and bad luck. There are really funny moments in the story and some nasty and sad moments too. The only downfall of the book is that it is narrated by Joey Tallon. Joey has issues caused by a dysfunctional upbringing and some heavy drug abuse when young and alcohol abuse when older. This means he can go from being in the depths of despair to the feeling he can conquer the world fairly quickly. His narrating style (supposedly recalled from diaries, notebooks etc) can be confusing at times and jump around. While this is doen on purpose and is probably a fairly accurate account of how someone like Joey would narrate the story it does at times lead to long spells of rambling and some jumping around. This causes the book to feel longer than the 300 odd pages it actually is.

That said Joey is a very well imagined charater. He can be an over the top pompous blowhard but he is also a sensitive and vulnerable individual who has had a lot of hardship is his life and personally I couldn't help but like him and enjoy his company. The other main charaters in Scotsfield are also fairly well defined and you do get a good sense of time and place and it is difficult not to feel a certain affection for Joey.

Very enjoyable book and worth sticking through the more rambling parts.