Philip Womack
Devil Take ‘Em
Patrick McCabe likes to employ disembodied narrators. His last book, The Stray Sod Country, was told by the Devil himself, bent on causing disruption in a small Irish town. McCabe uses the same technique in both parts of this odd book, which is actually a pair of novellas, ‘Hello Mr Bones’ and ‘Goodbye Mr Rat’. Whereas the Devil could have been read as a means of expressing the externalisation of long-held tensions, here the narrators’ motivations and purposes are much more elusive.
They are both unreliable, for a start. In ‘Hello Mr Bones’, Mr Bowen – whose name slips between Bohan, Bones and Bonio, a clown – asks us to be drawn into his plans for revenge, which he is orchestrating from beyond the grave. This is a promising premise and McCabe
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf