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 Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe
reviewed by Underview
Original appearance: Albedo one issue 17, Autumn 1998
Right now, publishers seem more prepared to splash a fortune on buying the rights to novels by young unknowns than to expend a modest amount on a marketing campaign for a reliable mid-list author. Of course, being reliable has never guaranteed support in any field. The unpredictable maverick in sport, especially team sports, has always been the one to attract attention, the one to get the breaks, the one to be forgiven his trespasses, no matter how extreme. In reality this is down to money. To non-basketball fans there are a couple of names that most people will recognise - Michael Jordan certainly, Denis Rodman probably. Why Rodman, a player who could not even make the starting line-up in the recent Basketball play-offs? Because he is a rebel who dies his hair green. Because he is a player of personality who can excite the fans with a single move. Because he puts bums on seats.
The same applies to the obnoxious Gazza. Clubs are still prepared to gamble millions on him just in case he might provide the odd flash of genius to brighten a boring winter Saturday in Middlesboro. And the fans are also willing to take the gamble. And I guess this is part of the reason why publishers will pay for a hint of genius in a new novelist and why the reading public, guided by hype and a slew of critics determined to be on the next passing bandwagon, seem to gobble up first novels and make their writers stars. But perhaps it is also because having no track record, first novelists have yet to disappoint.
Take Patrick McCabe as an example, shot to stardom with The Butcher Boy (not his debut by the way) and now, with his next novel, perfectly placed to cash in on the success of that predecessor and the razzmatazz of the Hollywood movie it was turned into, all he had to do was turn in a worthy successor and sit back and count the loot. Unfortunately Breakfast on Pluto is not the novel it needed to be.
It's not that it is a bad novel. By no means. It is a well-crafted, interesting and even brave piece of fiction. McCabe has taken a difficult subject and central character (homosexual prostitution and transvestism) and managed to produce an eminently readable piece with a genuinely sympathetic, if pathetic, anti-hero(ine?).
Patrick 'Pussy' Braden is the transvestite bastard son of a rural Catholic priest in rural 1950's Ireland. Raised as an orphan he makes a break to London as soon as he is old enough where he makes a living servicing the needs of business-suited city gents and ends up in jail for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Breakfast on Pluto is Pussy Braden's memoir, written for his beloved psychiatrist, who has deserted him. It is funny, sad, brave and ultimately too lightweight to deliver on the promise of The Butcher Boy. But it is still sufficient to keep McCabe marking time in the front rank of modern Irish novelists.
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