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A real devil of a story

The final novel in McCabe's small-town series finds an ensemble cast wrestling with their lives in 1950s Ireland.

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
October 16, 2010 at 6:51PM
The Stray Sod Country by Patrick McCabe
The Stray Sod Country by Patrick McCabe (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

In Patrick McCabe's diffuse new novel it's 1958, and the devil himself is abroad in the small Irish border town of Cullymore. He's also the narrator. In that capacity he's often amusing, as you would expect him, or any other McCabe narrator, to be. One young character, for instance, thinks of distant London as "a city where the words sexual intercourse blinked incessantly from neon boards." However, the devil's excessive fondness for adverbs, fragments and archly italicized phrases means that the charm of his voice eventually wears thin.

"The Stray Sod Country" features a large cast of characters, from the outcast ex-teacher James A. Reilly to the theatrically ambitious parish priest, Father Hand; from lonely dentist Albert Craig to fragile housewife Golly Murray, who stands in the intersection between the town's Protestant and Catholic populations.

Many members of this ensemble go through variations of the same experience: a kind of demonically sponsored nervous breakdown, which pushes them toward the psychic space the title alludes to: "The Stray Sod ... is a concept deriving from Irish folklore. It's to do with being lost in what once were reassuring surroundings. Being intimidated, confused -- by the very thing that once made you feel secure."

Now that's a fine, novel-worthy conceit, the kind of idea that McCabe's gleefully Gothic imagination usually turns into a nimble fiction. But this time the result is rather flat. Lives unravel (some to the very end of their spool), modernity comes to town, the story advances towards a self-consciously melodramatic ending, and none of it adds up to very much. If you've read a McCabe classic like "The Butcher Boy," you'll miss the half-demented intensity of a protagonist like Francie Brady. In "The Stray Sod Country," with its multitudinous points of view, it's as if that intensity, that antic menace, has become no more than a darkness on the edge of town.

McCabe's fictional world is as influenced by B-movies and B-sides (remember them?) as it is by other works of literature, and so he's always flirted with a sort of pop culture triviality. For example, some of his characters strike poses that could be straight out of a garish Hammer House of Horror flick: Father Hand is pictured "in the monstrousness of the darkness, thrusting the bedsheet into his mouth." It's all very amusing, but in "The Stray Sod Country," where McCabe has spread the story fairly thin, it leaves many of the characters with a cartoonish feel.

Yes, there are moments of genuine chill and disquiet, but one would have expected more with the "inscrutable director of souls and motivation" narrating the tale. "The Stray Sod Country" doesn't provoke much "sympathy for the devil."

Robert Cremins, author of "A Sort of Homecoming," teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.

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ROBERT CREMINS

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