Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel [Hardcover]

Patrick McCabe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2000

Patrick McCabe has long been recognized as a writer of rare talent and unique voice, whose vision of the world is so distinctive that "McCabesque" has become an adjective with multiple meanings, including "exquisitely, beautifully, mad in the head!"

He was a Booker Prize finalist for The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Aer Lingus/Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was made into a motion picture directed by Neil Jordan and cowritten by McCabe and Jordan. He was again a Booker Prize finalist for Breakfast on Pluto, which won the Spirit of Life Arts/Sunday Independent Irish Literature Award and was a number one international bestseller.

McCabe has been described as "the lodestone of new Irish fiction" (Wall Street Journal), "a dark. genius of incongruity and the grotesque" (Sunday Observer) and "one of Ireland's finest living writers" (New York Times Book Review).

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented on McCabe's "remarkable...ability to induce compassion for the unlikeliest people," and in Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel, that ability and the full range of his "grotesque genius" (Marie Claire) combine to produce a brilliant, macabre' dementedly funny and surreally imagined fiction of intertwined narratives set in a small Irish town. McCabe himself has described Mondo Desperado as being "like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio--on drugs."

In his mondo tales of the insular town of Barntrosna, McCabe assembles a distinctly Irish crew of odd and unusual inhabitants who live on and regularly cross, often unconsciously, the border between fantasy and reality. In "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge," Larry Bunyan is certain his demure wife is secretly out at night with deadbeat swingers, shooting drugs and having wild sex, while in "I Ordained the Devil," the Bishop of Barntrosna confesses that his ordination of Father Packie Cooley was really an ordination of His Satanic Majesty.

Another Barntrosna resident, Dr. John Joe Parkes, discovers "The Valley of the Flying Jennets," the secret place in the mountains created by his Dr. Frankenstein--type medical ancestor where his horrible, mutated genetic failures live. In the concluding "Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," Noreen escapes Barntrosna, goes to London for nursing school, finds a lesbian lover, and teams up with her to rob and terrorize London until her mother, boyfriend and parish priest bring Noreen back home.

With sly wit, characteristic, brilliant blending of sadness and humor and macabre genius, Mondo Desperado is a wonderfully imagined work of fiction--McCabe's most dazzling yet--from a truly original literary talent.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You may not have heard of Phildy Hackball, but thanks to Patrick McCabe--and, we're told, to "an ingenue of an English publisher who had never been in Ireland before"--you're about to get your chance. Hackball is the putative author of Mondo Desperado, a collection of short stories that explore the underbelly of provincial Barntrosna. And what an underbelly it is! McCabe's mouthpiece delivers all the graphic details on Declan Coyningham, the holiest boy in town by far, who seems headed for a life in the church until the locals decide that his inflated prospects need further inflating (literally). Then there's Cora Bunyan, the narrator's wife, who's been enjoying one too many Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge. And let us not overlook a cameo by the actual Bruce Lee, who importunes Hackball to be his ghost writer. Some would have it that the kung fu maestro is just a waiter from the Red Lotus Temple restaurant in Mullingar, but the narrator is nonetheless determined to maintain the highest literary standards:

I wish my story to be as near perfect as possible. To outline and candidly delineate not just the background to my years of friendship with Bruce Lee but that of the martial arts as we have come to know them--the heists, the head-busting she-wolves, the drug lords, the torn trousers, the pieces of other films that get stuck in by accident. And until I have that story told to my satisfaction, I see no point in concerning myself unduly as to whether I receive the occasional letter from a publisher or not.

McCabe's follow-up to Breakfast on Pluto (which made the Booker Prize shortlist) confirms him as one of Ireland's most distinctive and inimitable voices. The stories in Mondo Desperado seem to emanate from some parallel universe, but with their diseased take on national stereotypes, they provide an incisive, viciously cruel commentary on some of Ireland's most sacred cows. And in the end, Phildy Hackball is a wonderfully naive drinking companion, forever leading us up the wrong alleyway. Each time you think you're safely at home, another satiric grenade goes off in your face. Read, laugh, and be afraid. --Alan Stewart

From Publishers Weekly

If you spliced Gualtiero Jacopetti's shockumentary Mondo films with the surreal clippings from the "Cruiskeen Lawn" newspaper column of Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O'Brien), the comic result might be this "serial novel" of short stories, shaggy dog tales and spoofs from the fictitious pen of McCabe's authorial desperado, Phildy Hackball, set in his crazy village of Barntrosna. Even stranger and campier than McCabe's recent Booker-shortlisted Breakfast on Pluto, these 10 intertwined stories mix loony subject matter culled from trashy paperbacks with Hibernian stereotypes and cliches. Like an Irish bull in a china shop, McCabe hilariously charges through yarns about genetically engineered winged donkeys ("The Valley of the Flying Jennets"), yokel farmers picked up in discotheques ("The Boils of Thomas Gully") and a pious schoolboy blown up not with a bomb but a tire pump ("The Bursted Priest"). The maniac citizens of Barntrosna somehow believe their wives are secret go-go dancers ("Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge"); the local Chinese takeaway is Bruce Lee's secret hangout ("My Friend Bruce Lee"); and the bishop's clerical protege was really Lucifer stirring up the swinging '60s ("I Ordained the Devil"). In a satire on McCabe's own career ("The Big Prize"), Barntrosna's unlikeliest novelist takes the mickey out of contemporary Irish writers and the award-lavishing British literary establishment. Only in the last, lengthy story, "The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," does this pulp fiction gag almost run aground, when Barntrosna's nicest student nurse goes to London, where she discovers lesbian love and drug racketeering before she is safely returned to the picturesque, demented town of McCabe's berserk imagination. 8-city author tour; 15-city NPR radio campaign. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060194618
• ISBN-13: 978-0060194611
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,340,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this is getting serious now, March 17, 2000

By 

asphlex "asphlex" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel (Hardcover)

I have to admit, I've been a huge fan a Patrick McCabe's for quite some time. Now I'm not one of those folks you sometimes read here who is painful with their glorious heapings of praise on their favorite authors, but McCabe (to me anyway) has become something of a unique spark. Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING--please publish Music on Clinton Street in the US--please?) I have read by this man is magnificent. From the grim, bleak and hysterically funny Carn, through the utter magnificence of The Butcher Boy (perhaps my favorite book), through The Dead School and Breakfast on Pluto, there is not a single thing I can say against this man. Then he comes and slams home a wonderful short story collection with this book. Okay, I'm not going to get into particulars (as my glowing, glorifying praise might imply), but this a just a wonderful book. Everything, everyone, every story is perfect. There is nothing more to add, nothing to take away. Everything is pure, everything is as it should be. Is this book sad like many of his others? Yes. But there is a darker comedic edge herein. The best, the best, the best book availible this year. Start picking up Patrick McCabe. Here is a future Nobel Prize winner (wait and see!) Here is the grand glory of Irish writers. Here is the single best writer in the world. For all of you would-be and wannabe and actual writers out there who might stumble across this superfluous praise, pick this up, read it, then brood over the fact that you will never be able to quite match McCabe's ability. I did. It hurts and then you try harder. This book is honesty, it is the truth. (I understand that I'm adding on the the ultimate irrelevence of this review, but it is just that wonderful. How many books have you read recently that you just can't stop praising?)

One side note: I hope McCabe doesn't write subsequent books under the heading of the fictitious author persona of this one. Not that I wouldn't gobble it up, but simply that it would be difficult to provoke the same passion for a place we've been before.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truth Masquerading as Absurdity, May 12, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel (Paperback)

I love Patrick McCabe's books. I really thought "The Butcher Boy," "Breakfast on Pluto," and "The Dead School" were exceptional so I knew I would love "Mondo Desperado" as well and I was right. This collection of stories is as wacky as they come (maybe even as wacky as "Breakfast on Pluto") but they are terrific and McCabe's alter ego, Phildy Hackball, is a character you won't soon forget.

Even Pat Cork's opening "Appreciation" of Phildy's decision to cast the citizens of Barntrosna as characters in a low-budget, B-movie (reminiscent of those the boys used to sneak out of school to see) is hilarious. And the citizens of Barntrosna don't let Phildy down. Time and again, they prove themselves more than worthy of any B-moviemaker's attention.

There is nothing quite as shocking in "Mondo Desperado" as the heinous crimes that took place in McCabe's masterpiece, "The Butcher Boy" and the citizens of Barntrosna aren't quite as off-the-wall hysterical as Patrick Braden, star of "Breakfast on Pluto," but "Mondo Desperado" does prove time and time again just how desperate the world really is.

There is the priest who believes he has ordained Satan himself, the Barntrosna girl who finds lesbian love in London and most of all, there is Larry Bunyan, the protagonist of "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge." Larry, for reasons both he and I don't quite understand, believes his rather frumpy wife, Cora, is having more than one affair behind his back. Larry is overcome with disbelief, but still, he says, he really has to hand it to Cora, for who would have believed it.

What McCabe's characters share in common, and the thread that ties these stories together, is the pathetic quality of their ludicrous plights. Plights they have, for the most part, created themselves. We don't want to be like them, but we can't help but see little bits and pieces of ourselves in them and it makes us laugh or cry...depending on good a sense of humor one has.

I don't think "Mondo Desperado" is quite Patrick McCabe at his finest. I think you need "The Butcher Boy" or "Breakfast on Pluto" for that, but "Mondo Desperado" comes very close. It's satiric, it's wacky, it's ludicrous, it's truth masquerading as absurdity. If you haven't yet read Patrick McCabe, "Mondo Desperado" might be a great place to start.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Desperate World Indeed, December 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel (Hardcover)

Irish writer, Patrick McCabe seems to be someone whose work you either love or hate with no in between. Anyone who has enjoyed his other books, such as The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto or The Dead School, is going to love Mondo Desperado. The uninitiated are going to be in for a surprise with McCabe's highly distinctive voice and style. It is black comedy with a capital "B," but it is black comedy of the highest order. In Mondo Desperado, McCabe builds on his earlier themes of life in the rural Irish borderlands. This book, set in the fictional town of Barntrosna, is the perfect vehicle for McCabe to showcase his ironic observations of the modern-day world.

The narrator of Mondo Desperado, which is structured like a series of short stories, is Phildy Hackball who takes us on a tour of Barntrosna. Although Phildy describes his major interests as being the cinema and drinking with his friends, his real passion lies in writing weird and wonderful stories based on his own unique observations of the residents of Barntrosna. With Hackball as narrator, McCabe allows himself carte blanche to let his absurdly comic imagination run wild. The results are dark, surreal, hilarious and outrageous. The tone of Mondo Desperado is in perfect keeping with its absurd subject matter. Hackball is a narrator who is never afraid of taking the liberty of using ten adjectives to describe something when one would have done very nicely. He gives us a view of life that is nothing less than a surrealistic riot, a panoply of color and activity concealed beneath the facade of the average Irish town.

It is this very absurdity of the mundane and the ordinary that gives McCabe his unique vision of the world and sets his work apart from that of other writers. Although the events described in Mondo Desperado are surrealistic in the extreme, each one is firmly rooted in reality. We begin by identifying with the characters so completely and then McCabe, in his genius, takes them to the blackest reaches of their soul and inflicts upon them the most terrible and bizarre of circumstances. These stories of a stifling, oppressive society, of overbearing mothers and hard drinking fathers, of hormonally-crazed young people driven slightly insane are, frighteningly, only a small step away from the world in which each of us lives our day-to-day life.

This is McCabe's unique talent and it is a talent he has developed to the fullest. He can make us laugh out loud and, at the same time, make us take a serious look at our prejudices, our stereotypes, our beliefs, our lives. Mondo Desperado is a book that deserves to be read by lovers of black comedy, lovers of good literature and anyone with an interest in modern-day rural Ireland. It is a wild roller coaster ride to the very edge of consciousness through a desperate world, indeed.