Customer Reviews

The Dead School

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having already read McCabe's chilling book, The Butcher Boy, I was looking forward to a repeat of the damaged but sympathetic characters and the delicious horror one finds there. This novel, however, boasts a broader scope and more subtle characterization than The Butcher Boy. More ambitious, but just as seductive, it boasts two main characters of different generations and personalities, colliding with nightmarish results. Because the characters are so normal, even happy, at the beginning, and their deterioration seems so accidental and avoidable, the sense of sadness and loss one feels at the end is even more intense.

Malachy Dudgeon is a young man whose childhood, though not ideal, is not bizarre, either. As a boy, he experiences love and security within his family, which more than outweighs any damage from bullying he faces by older kids, even when his family situation changes. Eventually, he goes to college, falls in love, becomes a teacher almost by accident, and is hired to work in a private boys' school in Dublin. Raphael Bell is his Headmaster. We learn of Raphael's almost idyllic childhood, his great success as a student, his firm friendships, his early career, and his shy love and eventual marriage. Passages of great, lyrical beauty pervade these descriptions. Inexorably, however, Bell's conservative, moralistic, and formal approaches to life and education come into conflict with the casual attitudes toward discipline, structure, scholarship, and traditional values which Malachy represents, and the fabric of their lives unravels, then shreds.

McCabe creates wonderful, understandable characters facing conflicts not unlike those many of us face, and voices so real we can recognize even their inflections. By deliberately evoking the feeling that if only we were there we might be able to help, he cleverly involves the reader in the action. For a teacher, however, he may dredge up real nightmares--of rude or surly students, impatient and demanding parents, classes for which more preparation was essential, compromises made because there was simply Not Enough Time, along with pedagogical conflicts between strict standards and flexible, creative learning. All of these issues come into play here, and they will keep you thinking long after you finish the book. Mary Whipple

Once again McCabe astounds. More haunting portraits of madness. People who suffer from devastating mental illnesses didn't become that way overnight. The characters in this book, much like the characters in THE BUTCHER BOY, suffer numerous insults and injuries at the hands of others. A masterful presentation of universal impulses.

When I chose Patrick McCabe's "The Dead School" from the shelf at my local bookstore, I expected nothing more than an interesting summer read. I soon found that McCabe's grasp of plot, dialogue, and tone would disturb as well as delight me. The main action of the novel is set in the Dublin of the mid-1970s. Raphael Bell, principal of St. Anthony's National School, and Malachy Dudgeon, a new, and not-very-dedicated teacher clash in a spectacular and haunting way. McCabe's understanding of the psychological motivations of his characters, and his detailed analysis of the parallel deterioration of the two men is first-rate. McCabe also has an extremely skillful ear when rendering dialect. The narrator's voice, for example, could have been that of a number of my Dublin friends, although its ostensible charm covers a heart that seems to delight in the tragedy that befalls Messrs. Bell and Dudgeon. All in all a rewarding and riveting novel.

An amazing book, it kept me in my room for hours straight with its perfectly real version of Ireland. Its highs were dizzying, hilarious, but its lows - be prepared ! This is something I noticed in none of the reviews, but it's TOTALLY depressing.

Mccabe's sing-song writing style (hard to create and pleasing to the eye) is opposite to the the dreary depressing material, he is one of the most creative users of the spontaneous stream-of-consciousness techniques, helping the reader enter the head of two characters, slowly descending into madness and mental illness, through complex opposites. There are a few moments early on in the novel of such expressed beauty and happiness for both characters and their significant others, it makes the endings even more devestating. Joyce would be proud of McCabe's seductively warped stream-of-consciousness

McCabe is one of the most introspective and naughty young novelists to hit the shelves this decade. His faculty with the third-person limited point of view is worth the price of admission. He inhabits these characters, who become unforgettable for their anachronistic manias and sensitivities. They are at once utterly recognizable and thankfully foreign. McCabe's wit is punchy and searing. This novelist is a cynic at first glance, but the slow transformation of his characters puts the lie to this; McCabe will not let go of the possibility of redemption for even the most debased. He is Irish after all.

One of the best books I have ever read - totally compelling read

Having read, and reviewed for Amazon, The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto, and Call Me the Breeze, I acknowledge that McCabe keeps plowing deeper along this same furrow: a lyrical narrative voice that tells relentlessly but as if charmingly of horror and madness. A difficult p-o-v to carry off, time and time again. Although few would immediately compare McCabe to his compatriot John Banville with his more middle-class, literate, and repressed Irish taletellers, still both authors strive to depict men at war within themselves, scarred by an often adolescent or boyhood experience that they can never escape. Banville prefers nuance, McCabe selects vertigo.



I had read this a decade ago but remembered little of it. I thought that I had not liked it that much compared to B Bpy or the later B on P. I gave it another chance, and find that the gradual onset of "an early retirement from both the schoolroom and sanity" in both Raphael Bell and Malachy Dudgeon is handled at its best in poignant and restrained fashion. For example, as Malachy haunts the Grand Canal, under a sky of lead and a city the color of dishwater, he stands near the bench with its statue of Patrick Kavanagh. The canal, however, clogged with green scum, reveals none of the sylvan peace that comforted McCabe's Ulster-born predecessor. Similarly, Malachy in his collapsing relationship with Marion shows surprising moments-- given that this is a McCabe novel-- of isolation and the need for consoling words that cannot come to Malachy's lips, even as he tries to make amends and seek comfort from his girlfriend.



Raphael and Malachy share trauma rooted in a childhood moment of a parent's revelation to their son. One is intentionally attempted and one is witnessed at secondhand. Without giving away the scenes or the plot, these vignettes show again McCabe's skill at giving the reader real unfeigned agony and heartache beneath the rather smirking, smart-aleck tone that dominates the omniscient narrator's own voice as the tale is told, as if to another group of sniggering students.



The trouble is that as troubles accumulate in 1970s Ireland, and ones that have far less directly to do with the Troubles in the North and more with the collapse of Catholic and patriotic ideologies in the Republic, their sheer weight tends to weary the reader about 60% of the way through the book. This is three hundred pages of practically no likeable characters, despite the blurb above on Amazon. Marie Evans as drawn here appears all too familiar as an exemplar of the Mary Robinson type of figure who would lead the transformation of Ireland-- the children replace a trip to Kilmainham Jail to honor the 1916 martyr-rebels with a day out at Waterword theme park. But, Raphael's hatred for Evans and the Terry Krash show and all the harbingers of today's secularizing Ireland would have gained intensity if they did not have hundreds of pages to burn through in their rage. Malachy's stint as a Withnail and I type of layabout in London again gets plaudits in its portrayal, but the detail is both too vague and too mundane for the years to register fully. I know part of this diffusion for both protagonists is their own mental decay, but this long slide downhill, unrelieved by much humor or relief, adds up to a wearisome trudge through the cobwebs of both men's vacant skulls.



I fail to find the whimsical light touch in this narrative, which stacks depressingly a series of increasingly miserable setbacks upon its frail schoolteacher pair. The narrator's voice from the start stays stoic and resigned. Fatalism pervades the book. True, a critique of Irish culture emerges, but no respite from the malaise arrives.



While the book probes deep into the damaged psyches of both men, and their antagonisms against each other and against the system that has failed them in a liberalizing society, these relevant and sociologically stimulating points are drawn out in this fiction to near tedium. As a portrait of a changing Irish psyche under the onslaught of the 60s and 70s, the novel has merit. But as a gripping read, more than Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto-- which for all their verve also followed rather predictable arcs akin to this novel-- The Dead School offers a place few may care to seek out even for a first read, unless enamored of every word McCabe has published. The talent remains, but the energy dissipates in a narrative that amounts to entrapment within the imploded mind. These labyrinths, as Beckett, Flann O'Brien, William Burroughs, Celine, Kafka and Philip K. Dick all found, challenge even the most imaginative fantasists when stretched into full-length novels.