McCabe’s ‘Call’ of the Wild.

Book Review by John Freeman

“THEY call me the breeze, I keep blowin’ down the road,” goes the old J.J. Cale song. “I ain’t got me nobody, I don’t carry me no load.” 

Tucked away in a town on the Northern Irish border during the mid-’70s, when bombs were tearing through Belfast pubs, Joey Tallon listened to music like this to blunt the terror of the times. He bopped to Joni Mitchell, dreamed of the open fields of Iowa and retreated into his mind. 

He also smoked his fair share of marijuana. In Patrick McCabe’s garrulous, meandering eighth novel Call Me the Breeze (Harper Collins), Joey recalls those years lived in a purple haze of dope and Herman Hesse. He thinks of the punk bands he worked for, the girls who turned him inside out, and the prison term (for a crime he did not commit) that turned him into a writer.

Like all of McCabe’s books, including the Booker finalists Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy, Call Me the Breeze is a wild, often surreal ride. 

But Joey’s warped humor does not quite cloak a heart that bleeds for his country. Joey aches less when Ireland is identified with “the Troubles” than when it becomes the tourism industry’s symbol for all things green, lovely and backward looking. He wonders: Which is worse?

Drawing from Joey’s memories, diaries and discarded writings, the novel stumbles toward the present day, when the narrator, oddly, is a hugely popular novelist who makes a go at politics.

An Irvine Welsh-style coterie of friends with terrible nicknames and of romantic dates susceptible to fatal overdoses gives this tale a raucous quality, but the real story is Joey’s tango between art and life. The key, he finds, is in discovering his voice, which happens primarily on the page rather than at the podium. 

McCabe gives the character a humdinger of a full-bellows roar, which-for once-sounds less like blarney and more like the blues.