Patrick McCabe came to my attention in the 1990s with his novel The Butcher Boy. Like that novel, Winterwood is the story of a killer. Like that novel, it is blackly comic. Redmond Hatch returns to rural Ireland where he meets Pappie Strange, a musician with a string of stories, some of which just might be true. Pappie Strange has a secret, though, and people warn Redmond away from him. Years later, now married to Catherine and with a young daughter, Immy, Redmond learns that Pappie has raped and murdered a young boy. This seems to knock something loose in Redmond’s head, and as the novel progresses he loses his wife and daughter, and fakes his own death. Only then does Winterwood become something truly unsettling.Winterwood contains many of the same sparks of inspiration that seemed to inspire The Butcher Boy. As well as being a novel about mental illness and crimes against children, it is a novel of a changing Ireland. That earlier novel showed an Ireland on the cusp of change – still locked in the battle between Catholicism and Modernity, where cinema can transfix the young more than God. In Winterwood, the change is of Ireland from a country of poverty to the Celtic Tiger, where money is no obstacle. This is the backdrop to Redmond Hatch’s macabre tale. McCabe shows people becoming disconnected to reality by their changing fates, and subtly probes at the dark heart of Ireland.Winterwood is, however, a problematical novel to read in 2013. McCabe published his novel in 2006, and Ireland was booming then – and the boom ends his novel on a particularly high note. Reading it I had expected McCabe to end his novel with Ireland broke and bust, as such would become that countries reality in 2008-9. The Celtic Tiger shot dead. Such an ending would have been a note-perfect natural ending for the story of Redmond Hatch – but it hadn’t happened when McCabe wrote this novel. Thusly Winterwood seems now to have a nostalgic glow for a time when, briefly, Ireland was one of the Kings of Europe. Real life has changed the way in which we read this novel.As usual, McCabe’s prose is wonderful: witty, sharp, on the nose. Redmond Hatch, like Francis Brady in The Butcher Boy, is a great character, a bleakly funny narrator we – well not like, but not dislike either – and who does some truly horrible things but who we stay with. If there is a fault in the novel it is that it falls apart a little in the final third. Without spoiling the novel for readers, Redmond Hatch commits an action that might very easily make us put the book down (it’s credit to the power of McCabe’s writing that we don’t), but McCabe has walked onto very tricky ground, and so his novel, which has been cutting and precise until this moment, must skirt around a troubling subject without giving name to it. It undermines the strength of his prose a little, but it is not fatal.This is a very good novel for the most, typically McCabe, and displays again his originality in contemporary fiction. And McCabe, even on minor form, is worth reading – and Winterwood, for its bulk, is McCabe firing on all cylinders. This is a strong, powerful novel.
This would be the part where I describe the books' plot, characters and my overall reaction. I am literally left speechless and numb by this book. Every thing is indirect, skipping and jumbled. This is what I was able to glean from "Winterwood". There is a man, Redmond Hatch, or, Dominic Tiernan? He travels to an Irish hillside town where he meets Ned Strange. Ned already knows Redmond. You see, Redmond apparently had been born in this town and then re-located to an orphanage after his mother's death....or murder? It seems that whilst at the orphanage Redmond is visited by his uncle Florian and molested every Sunday. The nuns turn a blind eye to this because he's just a swell fella? Red grows-up, meets the woman of his dreams, decides to write a book about Irish mountain ediquette. Ned Strange knows all about Redmond and his past and begins to stir up long-buried emotions. He manages to take this all in stride until his marriage crumbles. The rest of the book is basically tracking his decent in madness. Hallucinations of Ned's ghost (oh yeah it is revealed that Ned is a child-killer, which is weird because I just finished "Blacklands" which is about another Irish child-killer....is this a big problem in Ireland?) push him over the edge until he murders his former wife and child and takes on an assumed identity. Of course, little of this novel was very coherent so I could have missed the point. My bad.
What do You think about Winterwood (2007)?
He's done it again. This book is haunting. Patrick McCabe leads the reader through another tale of madness. This one creeps up on you. No one is quite who or what they seem. The horror is veiled, thinly referenced but always present. The entire book felt like waiting for a sucker punch to the gut that never quite came. At the same time, by the end of the book I felt as if every character in the book had kicked me as hard as they could but, somehow, I didn't notice when each individual blow fell. This is a slowly rolling snowball, not an avalanche but it will consume you and leave you trapped underneath it after the last page is turned. Also of note, please be aware that this book contains a myriad of potential abuse triggers. All kinds. Avoid as necessary.Previous notes:01/22/08 - Have a copy but want to take my time with it so I'm putting it off until I make it through the loans.Before it came out - I'm dropping everything and reading this one pretty much the instant it comes out in paperback.
—Mairi
I suppose Winterwood has been marketed as a horror story (and it certainly is horrifying), but it's essentially a character study of a disturbed individual. There is very little violence directly referenced; mostly there are vague references peppered between the narrator's disarming optimism, that are all the more frightening for what they leave to the imagination. I made the mistake of reading quite a large chunk of this book before going to bed -- needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night.This is the first novel I've read by McCabe and what I admire most is how finely structured the story is. The narrator's voice and fixations provide a perfect filter for the tensions of modern Ireland.
—Michael
This took me over for a while.A very disturbing story from a very disturbed and unreliable narrator/s. Trying to peer between the lines and work out what was really going on is part of the point, but I read it maybe two and a half times, and I still wasn't sure quite what the relationship between Red and Ned was or how much of the life he was telling us about could actually have happened. And I wasn't entirely sure that the author was entirely sure either.Compelling, but perhaps a little too muddy for me.
—J D Murray
