Call Me the Breeze - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

3.22

172 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057121746X ISBN 13: 9780571217465

Publisher: Gardners Books, 2004

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Joey Tallon has witnessed many profound changes in the small town of Scotsfield. The men have changed from brutality and corruption to wealth and respectability. And Joey's transformed himself too, and it's his love for Jacy that's brought the transformation. So now Joey Tallon is gonna tell it like it was...But who'll believe a kidnapper, a fantasist, a jailbird, when he says he knows the truth about the past the Scotsfield men would rather leave buried? And who's brave enough to hear his testimony?

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About the Author:

Patrick McCabe is the author of The Butcher Boy (1992) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Dead School (1995) and Breakfast on Pluto. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.

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.
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