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    The Holy City: A Novel
    The Holy City: A Novel
    The Holy City: A Novel
    Ebook196 pages4 hours

    The Holy City: A Novel

    By Patrick McCabe

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    About this ebook

    In this strange, hypnotic novel, Chris McCool, the dandyish, debonair playboy of a small and insulated community called The Happy Club, reflects his two lives: the one he lives, and the darker one he's tried hard to forget. The illegitimate son of a rich Protestant landowner's wife and a poor Catholic farmer, Chris wanted to be a sixties swinger--driving a Ford Cortina, owning a pair of purple velvet flares--but, despite his good intentions, could not overcome the mysteries and regrets of his own upbringing.
    With a series of Freudian flourishes, McCabe gives us a narrator whose own insecurities, and most importantly his obsession with a young Catholic Nigerian boy named Marcus Otoyo, prevent him from seeing the truth of what he is capable of. Are Chris' inner struggles with his parentage and religion merely personal quests--or do they mask an angrier, more dangerous person beneath?
    Tense, artful, and eerily compelling, The Holy City is a novel of faith, anxiety, and dark secrets, with a stunning and brilliant conclusion.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJul 1, 2009
    ISBN9781608191604
    The Holy City: A Novel
    Author

    Patrick McCabe

    Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. His other novels include The Butcher Boy, The Dead School, and Call Me the Breeze. With director Neil Jordan, he co-wrote the screenplay for the film version of The Butcher Boy.

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    • 4/5
      The Holy City is unreliably yet truthfully narrated by another of McCabe’s mentally unstable characters, Christopher J. McCool, currently, in his late sixties, a resident of his own little abode he refers to as “The Happy Club.” McCool’s heyday was the 1960s, when he reveled in the music and wild dress. His town, Cullymore, was changing radically as the world changed. The story switches between then and present time.The product of an illicit liaison between his protestant mother and a catholic, McCool was not allowed to live with her as a child, only seeing his mother during her furtive visits. McCool has never quite recovered from his abandonment and the scorn of his father.McCabe doles out McCool’s truth in small bites, hint, and intimations, skillfully. His obsessions and disappointments are the basis for a danger that is never quite spelled out, but can be deduced.

    Book preview

    The Holy City - Patrick McCabe

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