“I had a letter from a young guy who lives in Germany now,” says Pat McCabe on a Friday afternoon in the Stag’s Head in Dublin. “He sent me this novel through a friend of a friend in Clones. There’s a whole new generation now coming through who always see me as some sort of elder statesman or something – how it’s fucking come to that I don’t know! – but they do and that’s alright, it amuses me, like.

“So I read it and it was really great. It was naïve, but it was a new voice. And he said, ‘What should I do with it? I keep sending it to publishers and they just won’t have me.’ And I said, ‘The world has changed. Why don’t you consider this – do it like musicians do it. It costs nothing now to print a book. Get an artist friend to do the cover and publish it yourself. Start doing little events and art exhibitions. But for fuck’s sake don’t wait around ‘til you’re 35, all broken up because some trust-fund baby editor didn’t like your book.’ Technology has made it so easy to do this stuff. Bands have led the way.”
Things are not what we thought they were – this is one of the themes that runs through McCabe’s new novel The Stray Sod Country. The title, which has been on his mind for at least four years now, represents a sort of psychic Twilight Zone where everything is distorted, jarred, out of kilter. We’re not in Clones now, Toto.
“I’ve always been trying to find the Irish equivalent of that,” McCabe admits. “That dislocated zone, as you say, that tilted otherness of a small town traditional rural area. Irish Catholicism and folklore is rolling in that stuff. And I think this is it, there’s nothing further I have to say about it. All the other books were leading to this point. The small town for me no longer exists fictionally. There’ll be some other kid like Paul Murray or someone who’ll come out of that world and reinvent it and that’s what should be done.”
The Stray Sod Country is, like Peyton Place or Spoon River Anthology, a panoramic cross-section of a small town. Its tone is operatic and polyphonic, not unlike Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
“They asked me how would I describe it,” McCabe chuckles, “and I said, ‘Under Milk Wood narrated by the AntiChrist,’ and they said, ‘We can’t use that,’ and I said, ‘Well, you did ask me!’ I’ve treated this subject with all these different styles. Carn was hard social realism, moving towards The Butcher Boy, which they called gothic, but I never thought it was gothic at all, there’s too much colour in it, the social fantastic was more appropriate. It has more in common with a graphic novel than Le Fanu.
“To me The Stray Sod Country felt more sort of elegiac, more plangent. A lot of the other characters had been dealt with in other books and there were only a number remaining, and a lot of them were approaching their 40s and 50s. My father died at 56. There was something about the age of 56 in my head, the continuum thing, because I thought, ‘Well if I don’t get the story down by 56 I won’t be around.’ I just had this in my head. Now the fact that I’m still sitting here one year off is kind of great, but I didn’t expect that to happen, not because I would abuse myself or anything, but because that was the DNA. That was the lifespan.”
The last four years have been a fertile period for McCabe. Aside from Winterwood, The Holy City and the new book, he’s written two plays, The Revenant and Appointment In Limbo. This is in contrast to the first half of the decade, which was hard going professionally and personally.
“Everybody forgets that writers, no more than everybody else, lead emotional lives,” he considers. “My wife’s mother died, and that was a huge thing. We looked after her, she had pancreatic cancer, and I’m not saying it was unique to us, but it threw us upside down and inside out. Her mother would look at me and say, ‘I haven’t lived a full life, I can’t die, this isn’t fair.’ That’s the last thing you want to hear from anybody, never mind a woman you really love.
“So then when people say, ‘Oh, McCabe or Murphy has lost it,’ they’re evaluating this as a commercial kind of thing. Lost what? This is an expresssion of what one was at at that time. It may be wildly undisciplined, but you couldn’t go near that, it would be forgery if you touched that. Do you know what I mean?”
Indeed. Neil Young once said that any true archive of his career must contain erratic and even bad work, because it would be dishonest to present only the polished stuff.
“I thoroughly endorse every word he says. We’ve talked about this before, about the body of work. The commercial impulse was to say about The Holy City, ‘What the fuck was all that about?’ The guy in the New York Times said, ‘Can we take this ridiculously overwrought story seriously?’ And I said, ‘Well within the confines of the two covers, not necessarily, but within the confines of the body of work, you’ve no fuckin’ idea how seriously I take it.’ If you look at the language of it, it’s all that sacredotal kind of thing, an examination of the language of Catholicism, an exploration of folklore. I couldn’t have done this without that. It’s a big long game. It’s very hard for me to explain that to a reviewer.
“But to answer your question, when that period passed, as inevitably things do, I said, ‘Now, everything is taken out and pared down and skeletal, because the horror lives right beside you, and the style has to reflect that.’ Next thing you know, ‘There’s no fuckin’ funny jokes in this one!’ But when that period was done, we were in a lovely place. You can get over shit, and when you get over it, the place that you get to is so valuable to you, it’s a plateau, a triumph in a quiet way. That’s what human endeavour is all about. And that’s kind of what fed into this book. Most people I’ve found, when you see them working together, there’s an altruism that releases an enzyme or something that animals don’t have. Against all the odds somehow I think is a weirdly positive book.”

The Stray Sod Country is published by Bloomsbury.