Winterwood [Paperback]

Patrick Mccabe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2006

The intention was, of course, to bring her out to Winterwood - to that magical place that only me and her knew - but I wouldn't tell her that until much later on, for I wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible Kimono! I remember laughing Kimono and Pinkie Pie! The Magic Castle, here we come! Winterwood, a place of dreams and mystery. Once, near Dublin, Redmond was in heaven, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine, and father to lovely daughter Immy. But later, much later, Red did something. And it could all never be like that again. Winterwood, a place of escape and sanctuary. Red meets Auld Pappie Ned, a fiddler and teller of tales with honeyed words who seems the authentic spirit of 'the old valley', indeed a fiddler by nature and a man so mesmerising that Red sees himself anew, so new in fact that only a fresh name will now do as he leaves (he hopes) the demons of his past behind, the apparitions. And then one day Red spies Catherine again. And still even this is not quite enough to save his new love Casey from the man who's called Dominic Tiernan. Winterwood, a place of chill and threat, of danger, and worse. Patrick McCabe, author of "Breakfast on Pluto" and the prize-winning "The Butcher Boy", has now written truly his most spellbinding novel; original and luminously canny, "Winterwood" shimmers as equally as it disturbs as Red tells his inimitable story of death and love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance writer Redmond Hatch loves his young wife, Catherine—he is 40 and she is 22 when they wed in 1981—and adores his infant daughter, Imogen, but in Irish author McCabe's eighth novel (his prior work included Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Redmond's happy slice of the world cruelly crumbles. A few years into wedded bliss, Redmond's wife cuckolds and then divorces him; he feigns suicide, assumes a false identity and disappears into a sad-sack life that spirals sharply downward after he reads a newspaper account of the suicide of convicted child murderer (and creepy acquaintance) Ned Strange: Redmond's suddenly haunted by nightmares and hallucinations in which Ned molests him. He stalks his former family and, in 1991, kidnaps and kills his estranged daughter, burying her in the isolated countryside—their imaginary "winterwood"—and visiting her grave over the next decade. Redmond, however, has yet to bottom out. Despite a fractured, hard-to-follow chronology, this tale about a man's descent into madness is both artfully repellent and hypnotically compelling. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Creepy. How you feel about this sparsely written Irish story will depend on whether you think creepy is an attractive or a troubling adjective for a book. In the fall of 1981, Redmond Hatch, an Irish newspaper reporter, returns to his small hometown to write about changing traditions. There he meets a strange fiddler named, appropriately enough, Ned Strange. Strange once knew the orphaned Hatch's parents, and the two men form a troubling relationship. As the novel progresses, Redmond becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator. As events unfold in a nonlinear fashion, a feeling of dread becomes palpable. Like Stephen King's The Shining, this novel is terrifying in its exploration of what can happen to seemingly ordinary people in bizarre situations. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc; Export ed edition (November 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747586934
• ISBN-13: 978-0747586937
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Into the valley of shadow, once again, December 20, 2007

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winterwood: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the fifth novel I've read of his; you can find my reviews of "The Dead School," "The Butcher Boy," "Breakfast on Pluto," and "Call Me the Breeze" on Amazon US. By now, long into a career that has earned McCabe acclaim, his protagonist Redmond Hatch fits a familiar pattern of a steady decline from middle-class suburban happiness, marital bliss, and contemporary creature comforts. By now, it becomes apparent that "Winterwood" repeats the narrative arc, and defamiliarizing storytelling twists, that chart the decay of a mind, an erosion of ethics, and a collapse into violence. All these characterize McCabe's fiction: he excels at bringing you within a couple of hundred pages from stability into chaos, often channelled from a disorientingly casual, knowing, and comforting voice that takes you into its confidence only to relate escalating tales of mayhem and murder.

The reviews posted on Amazon US practically gave away the entire plot. Perhaps, given the trajectory of McCabe's sorrowful taletellers, this may not spoil any surprises. By the eighties, a third of the way through the book's pages, I saw the end coming, and the rest of the book, as they say, was all downhill. So, what kept me reading this grim account? McCabe's best quality remains his diabolically intimate, insinuatingly composed conversational style. It's as if the Archfiend took you into his parlor for a fireside chat.

However, few elements stand out for their individually rendered scene-setting, or their particular turns of phrase. The effect of such novels by McCabe accumulates gradually. They can be confusing; more than once I had to check chronology or casual asides that, in giving or withholding key details, otherwise would have left a casual reader bewildered. Although I wished for more about the promising clash of mountainy men and Slievenageeha Lidl (the name sums up not only the superstore but the juxtaposition that increasingly mars modern Ireland), the societal changes, well-evoked in a couple of quick paragraphs about the unceasing traffic of today's Rathfarnham and the shopping mall-with-casino that towers over the once-moribund valley of the author's childhood sum it up, I suppose, enough for McCabe. I have always been attracted by his male misfits, who find recourse to assault as their tender spouses turn adulterers and their parents and relatives (a bit too predictably by now, as in so much of Irish fiction alas based on fact the past few decades) turn molesters. McCabe understands the disintegration of the hapless figure who cannot withstand the impact of early deceit, and how childhood's shadows stretch across the twentieth century into our own frenetic age.

So, this novel, while strong in the manner of earlier novels, does follow this same path. It is McCabe's direction for his imagination to run wild within the tracks of insanity that he loves his characters to follow. He does, by now in his fifties, show his command of such themes. Yet, I do wish he could step aside from the twisted creatures he creates so delicately. You flinch when reading his stories. He doubtless would have it no other way, but after the fifth such encounter with these dark voices, I hesitate to return to another Irish gothic cry from the depths of evil.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't finish it, May 7, 2009

By 

Daniel A. Scott "Just honest!" (Philippi, WV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winterwood: A Novel (Paperback)

I got about a fourth of the way through it and just couldn't take it anymore. It was a struggle just to get that far and what I did read was confusing and depressing. Pass on this one.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chilly Scenes of Winter, February 12, 2007

By 

David H. Schleicher "Author of The Thief Maker" (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winterwood: A Novel (Hardcover)

Patrick McCabe's haunting novel "Winterwood" begins charmingly enough with our narrator Redmond Hatch telling of his time revisiting his old mountain home in Ireland and reveling in the tall tales of the proud local drunk, Ned "Auld Pappie" Strange. There's an almost instant undercurrent of dread to the storytelling as we quickly become aware that neither Ned nor Edmond are going to be very reliable narrators, both soon overcome with the dark secrets and the Banshee ghosts of their pasts. Ned, it seems, my not be so innocent a weaver of tales, and Redmond is crippled by a crumbling marriage to a woman he is madly in love with and a troubled childhood he can't seem to escape.

McCabe is a master of writing dialogue in local dialect, as I often found myself reading out loud the early stories of Ned Strange and speaking in a rather effective Irish accent.

Even more so, McCabe is a master of stark, economical writing. Shocking details come quick and fast, presented nonchalantly as the story progresses so that they soon fester in the mind of both the reader and the narrator until they creep back into the narrative in horrifying ways.

There are times when the narration becomes a challenge to follow, as the book becomes rife with name-changes, locale-switching, and no apparent chronology to the order of events. Even the chapter titles and time and place headers become deceptive, as once lost inside Redmond's head, all becomes jumbled in half-truths, lies, exaggerations, under-statements, and grotesque speculations.

Still, McCabe is able to ground things with simple passages that are both lyrical and haunting in their slim descriptive power. By the time you finish visiting "Winterwood" you are left with the singularly unnerving feeling of being chilled to the bone. Hell, it seems, is a cold, cold place where the devil can't wait to shelter you.