Product Description

Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick McCabe's lyrical and haunting new novel, became a #1 bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970's and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder. Brilliant, startling, profound and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines light and dark, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long after the initial impression.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #631908 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Released on: 1999-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com 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

From Publishers Weekly
McCabe is a master ventriloquist. In The Butcher Boy he projects the voice of a brash, fast-talking, murderous boy in order to tell a story of divisive tension in a small Irish town. In The Dead School the liberalization of modern Dublin came to readers in the voice of a doddering headmaster. Here, in this Booker Prize finalist, McCabe walks far out on a limb: in the voice of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a male transvestite fathered by a priest and brought up by foster parents, he tells of life in a violent Irish border town in the early 1970s and an exiled existence in London. (Imagine Ru Paul discoursing on "the Troubles" over a top-40 soundtrack.) Of course, they are more Pussy's troubles than his countrymen's, but Pussy is perhaps the most unabashed narrator in Irish writing since Beckett's Malone. He's nothing if not full of style: "And who was it within my darkened cellbox upon whom mine eyes did gladly fall as there I sat sky-high a-twiddle, ringed around by stars and planets?" Pussy's tale, brief but never boring, is structured as the story told to his doctor in 56 tiny chapters with theatrical asides. Stigmatized as the bastard son of the town priest whose "starched vestments... were partly responsible for his son's attraction to the airy apparel of the opposite sex," Pussy flees to England, where his transvestitism looks suspiciously like a disguise (his old IRA connections are of no help in this regard) as he moves bout Picadilly Circus, picking up men, falling in love and fantasizing various bombing schemes to avenge his own sufferings and that of his down-and-out friends?Charlie, who falls prey to drink, and Irwin, killed by the IRA for informing. Comically self-absorbed, Pussy is nonetheless charming company, and McCabe manages adroitly to paint a tender portrait of lives destined to be lost to history?apolitical folk welcome neither in Catholic Ireland nor in the U.K. while the sectarian war rages on. A recently penned preface reveals the author's hope that this time is over and that a new tolerance of difference will take hold. (Dec.) FYI: The title comes from a 1969 chart-making song in the U.K.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
It's fair to say that McCabe's Irish novels can be termed tragedies; they usually center on hapless protagonists who are victims of their lifestyle, impulses, or just foolish dreams. The pedigree of his latest "hero" isn't promising either; he's Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a transvestite prostitute and bastard son of a local priest. Patrick's life and times are revealed through a diary he keeps as therapy for his psychic wounds. He struggles with his family history, loses a friend to the IRA, and falls in and out of love. As tragedies go, though, this is a light one; most of the violence is emotional rather than physical, and McCabe allows Pussy a glimmer of hope for a better life at the end. Nominated for 1998's Booker Prize and a No. 1 best seller in Ireland, this may not be the masterpiece the publisher is claiming, but McCabe (The Butcher Boy, LJ 5/1/93) certainly has a talent for creating memorable characters who are worth spending some time with, warts and all. For public libraries.
-?Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Darling Pussy...
I just finished this book, and while I don't often write reviews, I felt inclined to do so upon reading so many negative ones. Simply stated, this book was wonderful. Utterly captivating in its hilarity, as much as its anguish. Pussy Braden will sweep you up and carry you off. Her journey is devastating, yet eternally optimistic as she searches for the mother she never had, yet always yearned for, and dreams up vengeful plots against the father that never wanted her. You may just fall in love with her along the way...I know I did.

I almost knew my own name
Once in a long while of hoping, wishing, weeping and praying does a book like this come along. Pardon me while I gush, but this book is quite simply one of the best first person narratives I have ever read, for one simple reason. I could actually hear our Puss' voice ringing inside my head, bouncing off my own cochlea. This in not only a nifty party trick my friends, but also an indication of some of the bravest, fiercest compassion and empathy put to good use I have ever had the pleasure to witness. It constitutes as redefinition of narrative "voice" and the extraordinary use to which it can be put. Inversions, run on sentences, horrifyingly extended metaphors, a grammarians nightmare. To hell with the sanctity of the English language in case there ever was any. To spare you all a worthless plot and to give any encouragement (or as the French say...encouragement) to those of you desperately searching for plot events let me say, release yourself from your struggle. The point of this book is to experience, yea bathe, in someone elses psyche for a while. And not the kind of repetitive, dull, mortifying psyche of say "Strange Interlude" but the psyche of a lively, severly troubled, struggling, unloved young person who none the less has learned somehow to live in a world that quite specifically denies his right to exist. This book goes beyond wordsmithing (ach, hateful word, get thee behind me wordsmiths) and moves into the exalted place of those who have created entire universes that draw in distract trouble traumatize and inspire. Thanks to the author for making my bookreading life worthwhile. Again. A Political Sidenote: I recommend picking up the Butcher Boy in case this book hasn't taught you enough about what happens to the unloved. A responsible sidenote: The ending is a little weak. I doesn't ruin everything, it just kind of makes you shrug and say "Hmnh" or some such unidentifiable syllable.

"Pussy"....the perfect metaphor for a troubled Ireland
Patrick McCabe may have hit pay dirt with "The Butcher Boy", but he has produced a masterpiece with "Breakfast On Pluto". In the character of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, McCabe has found the perfect metaphor for a troubled Ireland. Just as the Irish struggle to define their identity in a climate of political strife and conflict, Pussy yearns to be reunited with his mother (a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor) but seethes with hatred and plots revenge on his father (no pun intended) whose identity remains a secret to all but the reader. Like his country, Pussy is sexually and emotionally in no man's land. His life as a transvestite, who does smashing impersonations of 60s English divas Dusty Springfield and Lulu, mirrors the pain and confusion of the times. McCabe's novel is a collage of incidents and minor sequences which flash back and forth in time to produce a criss cross matisse of images which somehow hang together. Short bursts of shocking violence alternate with dreamy ruminations of the past (mostly about Pussy's origins). As a satirist, McCabe's command of the genre shines through the use of a rapid fire tongue-in-cheek style to great effect. "Breakfast On Pluto" is truly deserving of its Booker Prize nomination. It is a massive literary achievement and will be enjoyed by all who read to be entertained and more !