The Butcher Boy

I read this novel when I was twenty-two years old.

I remember exactly where I was (in the kitchen of a dilapidated apartment I loved) and what time of day I read it (early afternoon until early evening). I cackled and sobbed (I am not a sobber), and afterward, I couldn’t get the main character’s voice out of my head for days. He narrated everywhere I went and everything I did.

Before then, I’d always written casual nonsense for my own entertainment, but I knew afterward I wanted to do that—I wanted to make people laugh, horrify them, and put… show more.

Okay, this book by a famous Irish writer is not really about apparitions of the Virgin, but it grabbed me by the guts and wouldn’t let go, and Mary’s appearances do help drive the bloody plot.

It tells the story of a lad named Francie who grew up in small-town Ireland in the 1960s. His fragile mother breaks down and commits suicide; his father is a brutal alcoholic; in reform school, a priest abuses him; his only friend abandons him; and he’s tortured by the mother of a would-be friend, who calls Francie’s family “pigs.” Let’s just say that she… show more.

Never has a terribly sad book been so much fun to read. Patrick McCabe is the master at creating chillingly unreliable characters, and schoolboy Francis "Francie" Brady is his greatest creation. The narrative is a blend of dirty realism and violent fantasy, and the farther along you get in the novel, the more difficult it is to tell them apart. There are still a handful of scenes that have stuck with me more than a decade after I read it. They made a good movie based on the novel, but the book is what you need. 

Taking place in rural Northern Ireland during the 1960s, The Butcher Boy tells the story of young Francie Brady, a misanthropic, confused Roman Catholic kid whose alcoholic father works in a slaughterhouse. Francie's first-person narrative is at times very funny, at other times very bleak, yet the novel is infused with a poetic lyricism that frames its protagonist with a curious empathy, even as the story veers into dark territory.