Breakfast on Pluto. Film Tie-In - Softcover

Patrick McCabe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330445073 ISBN 13: 9780330445078

Publisher: Pan MacMillan, 2006

Synopsis

Originally published in 1998. Paddy Pussy is a juvenile transvestite from the small town of Tyreelin. A question is raised whether he is just a transvestite who longs to settle down in a loving relationship or whether he is a cunningly disguised IRA bomber ready to wreak destruction and death.

About this title

Review:

Patrick McCabe hit pay dirt with his third novel, The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the 1992 Booker Prize, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism." In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also on the Booker shortlist, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate, mimicking perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the age of 14, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr. Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story; as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. --Alan Stewart

About the Author:

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. He has published four other novels, Music on Clinton Street (1986), Carn (1989), The Butcher Boy (1992), and The Dead School (1995). He cowrote with director Neil Jordan the screenplay for The Butcher Boy and is finishing a collection of stories.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan MacMillan
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0330445073
• ISBN 13: 9780330445078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 199