As the narrator affirms, “It’s a hard station, that’s for sure.” For 200 pages McCabe sustains a tremendous black-comic momentum. Relentlessness is something McCabe does very well: here, as in his dismantling of the priesthood in 1995’s The Dead School, there will be no prisoners. The voice is an insistent companion who, having got hold of an elbow, has no plans to stop until his hour is exhausted or the auditor collapses under the weight of memory, bile, repetition and implication. In fact it’s easy to ignore the verse, except as an effective scoring method: the reader hears the book as something spoken aloud, or whispered, or snarled, or insinuated or spat into his ear. Patrick McCabe, best known for The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto (both Booker-shortlisted in the 1990s, and adapted into films), is not the first prose writer to seek the lingering prestige of poetry without having to write it.

Poguemahone is described as a free-verse novel, which in the worst case would mean it possesses the virtues of neither. If the alcoholic O’Brien had indulged in different drugs, he might have written this book. There is plainly something of Flann O’Brien about this – the intrusion of the imaginary on someone else’s not wholly credible story, for example, as well as an affinity with the implacable, stony road-to-hellishness which underwrites the comedy of novels like The Third Policeman. In the near-present day we find Una, once an aspirant nightclub singer, at 70, in a care home in Margate, trying to round up the troops to put on a “caper” for the residents’ amusement. Dwelling in the margins, supercharged with folkloric vengeance, is he, as it were, an “actual” mythological figure, a “gruagach”, or merely not there? He is also the main narrator. Una, who works as a cleaner, has a brother Dan, whose ontological status is to say the least uncertain. At its centre is Una Fogarty, illegitimate daughter of Dots, an Irish prostitute. Poguemahone (Gaelic for “kiss my a-”) is a 600-page novel driven by events real and imagined in a shared house in Kilburn in 1974, involving a bunch of belated hippies and counter-cultural pretenders, bent on changing the world while barely registering strikes, shortages and IRA bombings.

Poguemahone book