Ratings7
Average rating3
With an introduction by Ross Raisin. A modern classic of Irish fiction, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker prize. When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent. Francie Brady is a small-town rascal who spends his days turning a blind eye to the troubles at home and getting up to mischief with his best friend Joe – hiding in the chicken-house, shouting abuse at fish in the local stream. But after a disagreement with his neighbour Mrs Nugent over her son's missing comic books, Francie's reckless streak spirals out of control and gives rise to a monstrous obsession . . . Fearless, shocking and blackly funny, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy won the 1992 Irish Times Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. It is a modern classic of Irish fiction, a portrait of the insidious violence latent in small town life and of a frenzied young man lashing out at everyone, even himself.
Reviews with the most likes.
Insanity as a literary device is a challenging thing to get right. This is a more literary take on it, trying to get into the mind of a very disturbed young man, who is living in a kind of juvenile fantasy that all his acquaintances have long grown out of. The prose is pretty, but the lyrical stylings and confused perspective really frustrated me as reader. I can see why people might enjoy it, but it is all just way to dense a literary styling for my own preference. It acted as a barrier to me engaging with the characters. I am just not a fan of flowery literary stylings...
It's not a badly written book, but I found it pretty tedious. A man in a pub told me I should read it, and I wish he hadn't.