Goldengrove

by Patrick McCabe

A vicious black comedy from Patrick McCabe, the author of Poguemahone, about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, two countries divided by a common history.

It's the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel bedroom in Woolsey Bay, we find the recently retired Chenevix Meredith looking back on his years running a theatrical agency in Dublin in the 1960s with flamboyant fellow Brit, Henry Plumm. What their clients don't know, is that both men are active agents of the British state posted to Dublin to identify and infiltrate terrorist networks.

But that unpleasantness was almost half century ago. Surely history has forgotten them? When Plumm is found floating in a bathtub with his skull stoved in, Meredith realises that as far as Irish history is concerned, the past is never dead: as a wise man once observed, it's not even past...

Genres: Ireland

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2025

About the author

Patrick McCabe came to prominence with the publication of his third adult novel, The Butcher Boy, in 1992; the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Britain and won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize for fiction. McCabe's strength as an author lies in his ability to probe behind the veneer of respectability and conformity to reveal the brutality and the cloying and corrupting stagnation of Irish small-town life, but he is able to find compassion for the subjects of his fiction. His prose has a vitality and an anti-authoritarian bent, using everyday language to deconstruct the ideologies at work in Ireland between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. His books can be read as a plea for a pluralistic Irish culture that can encompass the past without being dominated by it.

McCabe is an Irish writer of mostly dark and violent novels of contemporary, often small-town, Ireland. His novels include The Butcher Boy (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (1998), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written a children's book (The Adventures of Shay Mouse) and several radio plays broadcast by the RTÉ and the BBC Radio 4. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto have both been adapted into films by Irish director Neil Jordan.

McCabe lives in Clones, Co. Monaghan with his wife and two daughters.

Pat McCabe is also credited with having invented the "Bog Gothic" genre.

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure how to rate this. I found the narrator's voice rather irritating, although less so as the novel progressed. His habit of comparing every character to a 1970s British character actor/comedian/TV personality might well alienate anyway below the age of 60 who will wonder who the heck these people were!
There's some parallel between Irish thespians and the ongoing Irish "Troubles" in the 1970s but I wasn't sure how much this mattered and in the end wasn't exactly sure how unreliable the narrator was supposed to be

[Colm · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fine, I guess, kinda disappointed. The references to actors, tv shows and plays from long before my time grew quickly tiresome and made keeping track of anythingdifficult.The unreliable narrator was very unreliable, which I understand is part of the point, but the jumps from present day to past were so fast it was difficult to keep up. Overall not my cup of stout