Patrick McCabe is led astray in 'The Stray Sod Country'

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With his groundbreaking books like The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, novelist, screenwriter and playwright Patrick McCabe has become one of Ireland’s most successful and widely admired authors. On October 11 he releases the final book in his “small town” series, titled The Stray Sod Country. It may be his greatest work to date. He talks to CAHIR O’DOHERTY about Ireland and people who have inspired him.

It's dead and gone, romantic Ireland, if it ever existed. The land of friendly neighbors, grand soft days, brown soda bread and lively wee dogs and the whole shebang has been consigned, wholesale, to history’s scrapheap.

It’s what’s coming in its place that’s the question now.

With his usual impeccable timing, Irish author Patrick McCabe has returned with a likely answer. McCabe’s dazzling and elegiac new novel The Stray Sod Country (Bloomsbury), the final in his “small town” series, explores all of the familiar tensions between the past and the present that grip the little border town of Cullymore, and through that the nation, and they often turn out to be explosive.

The most brilliant and seemingly effortless novelist Ireland has produced in decades, McCabe, 55, who’s teaching Irish literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana this fall, could easily afford to sit back on his achievements to date (The Butcher Boy, Winterwood, Breakfast on Pluto among others). 

Thankfully, though, he’s been prolific in his explorations, and it’s hard to point to a contemporary Irish novelist that combines his virtuosity, his sense of place and his modernity.

Born in Clones, Co. Monaghan in 1955, McCabe grew up in a little border town that seemed to be bordering on everything (including insanity, hysteria and civilization).

It was, he recalls, a town full of dark secrets and unforgettable characters, and like everyone else there he talked to everyone else there.  Going “up the town” to him meant stepping out to blather away with everyone you encountered, be they eight or 80.

It was enviable training for a man who’s made small town Irish life one of his most accomplished subjects. And, he freely admits, it’s a way of life that has all but disappeared now.

But like James Joyce, the illustrious predecessor that McCabe’s work most resembles in terms of its sheer invention, he has recorded that vanished world note for note in his own imagination and he gives it back to us, transformed, in his books.

The first thing to ask about his latest novel is what is the “stray sod” it takes its title from?

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