The Holy City: A Novel - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

2.95

131 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596916117 ISBN 13: 9781596916111

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2008

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A disturbing and darkly funny new novel from the award-winning author of Breakfast on Pluto, The Butcher Boy, and Winterwood.

In this hypnotic novel, Chris McCool, the dandyish, debonair playboy of a small and insulated community called the Happy Club, reflects on his two lives: the one he lives and the darker one he's tried hard to forget. The illegitimate son of a rich Protestant landowner's wife and a poor Catholic farmer, Chris wanted to be a sixties swinger―driving a Ford Cortina, owning a pair of purple velvet flares―but, despite his good intentions, could not overcome the mysteries and regrets of his own upbringing.

With a series of deftly Freudian flourishes, McCabe gives us a narrator whose own insecurities, and most importantly his obsession with a young Catholic Nigerian boy named Marcus Otoyo, prevent him from seeing the truth about what he is capable of. Are Chris's inner struggles with his parentage and religion merely personal quests―or do they mask an angrier, more dangerous person beneath?

Tense, artful, and eerily compelling, The Holy City is a novel of faith, anxiety, and dark secrets, with a stunning and brilliant conclusion.

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About the Author:

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. His novels include Carn, The Dead School, and The Butcher Boy, winner of the Irish T imes/ Aer Lingus Literature Prize, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize and made into a highly acclaimed film directed by Neil Jordan. Breakfast on Pluto, published in 1998, was also on the Booker Prize shortlist. Patrick lives in Clones.

From AudioFile:

Humphrey Bower is a card-carrying genius in my book, but here he may be trying to do the undoable, presenting a first-person "unreliable narrator" so obviously insane that he has no moral tension or suspense to work with. Released after many years in a mental institution, Chris McCool mentally wanders back to the days of his youth and promise, if any, in Ireland's swinging '60s and forward to his sensationally self-deluding and intensely creepy present, in which he happily drones at his bored and appalled listener, you. Bower can do any accent and even sings in several distinct characters' registers, but his very skill is self-defeating here; the more real McCool becomes, the more you want to get away from him. It's a fine performance but not a likable experience. B.G. � AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

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