Once again, Pat McCabe has chosen a song title to lead us into his latest extraordinary book. Break- fast On Pluto was a hit for Don Partridge in 1969 and although nobody much remembers Partridge, McCabe still knows all the words and he could also tell you what was on the B-side. Music and song from all quarters features heavily in Breakfast On Pluto with constant and suitable references to Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, David Cassidy and Vic Damone.
McCabe is a believer in music and the summoning up of loaded old songs, as he understands perfectly, helps create not only an atmospheric soundtrack to the period but also injects specific resonances which enable a writer to score a direct emotional or thematic hit. "Yes, but there's nothing new about it. If you go through Ulysses or Dubliners in particular, it's peppered throughout with songs like I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls or Oh, You Are A Naughty Girl but they're all very carefully chosen. For me music is something primal or atavistic - whether it's your mother singing Mares Eat Oats And Does Eat Oats or whether it's the first few bars of Like A Rolling Stone coming wafting out of the Venice Caff in Clones. Just like any great art, it's stuff that sets the hairs standing on the back of your neck or gives you the goose-pimples. Music can do that in three minutes and perhaps there are more great three-minute singles than there are books that give me that kind of jag. And of course you know this one about all art aspiring to the condition of music."
Pat McCabe's conversation is full of music. We talk about Horslips, Dan Sullivan's Shamrock Band, Bob Dylan and Gavin Friday. A piano player himself, there was a time when he might have devoted all of his energies to music, but in the Irish showband orbit in England the choice for an aspiring writer was rather stark.
"I was playing with Paddy Hanrahan and the Oklahoma Showband - haring round the country and teaching at the same time. And I kind of weighed up the way showband men lived at that time, maybe playing in the Gresham on Holloway Road or the National in Kilburn and up all night drinking with the ballroom owners and other musicians. And at that time it was pints of Smithwicks and double Pernods all night. And so I thought to myself: well, it's going to be a toss-up between this and writing. And if it's going to be writing I just can't live at this pace. And so I made my decision then.
"I believe good writing comes from ordinary mundane domestic stuff and not from any of this Beatnik stuff at all. And anyway I wasn't good enough to be a proper musician."
One of the joys in the film of The Butcher Boy was hearing the language of that part of Ulster on the big screen. McCabe's ear is pitch perfect in this regard and now, in Breakfast On Pluto, he has taken on another voice entirely, that of Patrick "Pussy" Braden. Our desperate hero/heroine sits in his/her headscarf and housecoat and writes his/her devastating story for Dr Terence the psychiatrist. It is clear that McCabe has a passion for the language and is tuned precisely into the vernacular, but equally importantly, he has a deep respect and regard for it.
"It's like this technicolour speech. I always used to wonder how you could meet a guy in a bar that had you enthralled talking in the vernacular and yet when you go to read a novel you don't find any of it at all. You're suddenly into this detached stuff and I never was comfortable with that. It might suit different cultures or whatever but I always found it kind of imperialist. Here you have some snooty writer stealing other peoples' stories and not acknowledging them.
"At least if you employ the vernacular of your mother or your father or your neighbours, there's an acknowledgement there. Ulysses was the most democratic work of fiction in that it took an ordinary, unspectacular man walking around Dublin whose thoughts, like everybody's, were a mishmash of gravitas and frivolity. Of course Virginia Woolf and these people were affronted by it because they were essentially class-based." Breakfast On Pluto is not like The Butcher Boy. Certainly, the latter is black, but the new book, minus Francie Brady, is relentlessly disturbing. Full of "the sordid, squelchy details of the life that was once lived by darling Patrick Braden," it is a book which cuts short its own laughs with cruelty, violence and absolute betrayal. In that sense it is not an easy read. By opening the door on Breakfast On Pluto, the reader enters a place he or she may not particularly want to be.
"Yes, that should be the way it affects people because that is the period I'm talking about. It was a period of not knowing where you belonged. Ireland didn't know where it belonged in the world and that was part of that time. Ireland North and South was on the cusp of great promise and utter disaster and civil war was lurching forward and pulling back all the time. And so it's like a death in the family - you forget about it momentarily and suddenly you remember again. So yes, it was very much the period, as I remembered it, that dictated the style of the book. Also, in The Butcher Boy the child's wonder keeps you going - the relentless optimism. But adolescence is a different kettle of fish altogether because your mind is more complex and you don't believe as much any more in the possibility of redemption and you hate and you rage. It's a boiling vat of emotions and so it was a much more difficult book to write. I wanted it to be really short too, like a grenade. When you hit the 1970s, that's when the sinister sub-text starts to kick in. But it's not just about an androgynous kid, it's about ambivalence and borders and it's very political I think. The song Breakfast On Pluto, which has a lovely, jaunty, lyrical, childhood feel to it, became a counterpoint to a kind of a suppurating underbelly."
First-person narratives demand a certain amount of Method acting on the part of the writer. For Pat McCabe to dwell imaginatively in the murky world of Pussy Braden, plying his trade in London and spending his earnings on maxis and minis while the city is literally exploding around him, brings with it many difficulties. This is not pleasant territory at all - it is one of constant danger, loneliness, desperation and death. Working from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. as McCabe does, these are difficult preoccupations.
"It's as far as I can go, I think. But at the same time, if you start something you should finish it and there's no point in getting coy or afraid. But no, it doesn't do you any good and I'm dropping novel writing for a while. I think Martin Amis said that you're never really there when you're writing a novel, you are always somewhere else - you're walking through a park with your kids and you're thinking about this trisexual dude in your book. But at the same time, as with Method acting, you know you're going to pull out of it. Initially it can be a bit scary but funny enough, when I wrote The Butcher Boy, I thought it was really funny. I mean, I liked the guy!"
The movie rights to Break- fast On Pluto have already been bought by Neil Jordan and McCabe praises Jordan's previous realisation of The Butcher Boy. Some writers, seduced by the perceived glamour of the big screen, might be tempted to keep that potential movie always in mind when writing the next book - certainly, screenplays disguised as novels are a common phenomenon - but for Pat McCabe the immediate task is difficult enough as it is.
"I'm so preoccupied with language that I really couldn't be bothered trying to second-guess it on the screen. It's never in my mind at all. I have to be totally faithful to the job in hand and collaborative stuff doesn't interest me in the slightest. But if it happens, it happens. "It's so obsessive with me. It's just - how do I get to the end of this story? And I just follow it along like a lapdog wherever it leads. I never plan anything because it's not an interesting journey for me then. You know the one Graham Greene has about it? `Let the horse run free and let it find its own way home'."
Pat McCabe would appear to be on the pig's back. He quite possibly has the greatest collection of good reviews in the known universe and a movie is already planned for Breakfast On Pluto. He is currently writing short stories again based on song titles but "no heavy-duty Method acting, just soap-bubble stuff". The proposed titles promise much - Mondo Desperado and Emerald Germs Of Ireland. The showband and the teaching days are definitely over and yet, in the McCabe house, the notion of success is wisely dealt with - "If it looks like nosing in the door, you have to make a decision very early on to shut it down straight away. I think you have to make that very clear to yourself and around The Butcher Boy time I had a feeling that it was happening. But it can all walk away very quickly too and any writer who has been rejected - as a writer should be - knows that. You never take anything for granted because you never know whether a novel is going to be delivered to you or not. I would never be cocky. I'd be deeply insecure about it in fact, and I think that's part of the game.
"One of the most interesting men I ever met was Pinter and he was full of that uncertainty. But then you do get a great sense of satisfaction out of being true to the muse or whatever you might call it. By the time the last full-stop is put down you say `well, that's the best I could do, I've done it to the best of my ability and I didn't flinch from it' - and that leaves you with a nice feeling. But as for success - you know what Friel said about it, it's only the postponement of failure."
Breakfast On Pluto by Pat McCabe is published by Picador at £15.99 in UK. Pat McCabe will read at Flanagan's, above the Crown Bar, 46 Great Victoria St, Belfast (tickets: Waterstones Belfast) on June 3rd at 7.30 p.m.; and Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin (tickets also available Hoggis Figgis) on June 4th at 8 p.m.