Volume 40, Number 16 · October 7, 1993
Never Call a Boy a Pig
By Julian Moynahan
The Butcher Boy
by Patrick McCabe
Fromm International, 215 pp., $19.95
During this century small town and village life in Ireland hasn't lacked for literary detraction and exposé. In fiction the line begins with George Moore; his short stories, collected in The Untilled Field (1903), depict monotonous and stunted lives where the imaginative are stifled by entrenched convention and a mean and rigid form of Catholicism, while the talented or spirited have little choice but to knuckle under or get out. For Moore, provincial life was a worst case of what was wrong with Ireland as a whole. In his three-volume send-up of the Literary Revival, Hail and Farewell (1911–1914), which paradoxically is one of the ornaments of the Revival, he called Ireland the place where dreams go unfulfilled and ambitions are blighted.
Review, 2225 words
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