Hello and Goodbye by Patrick McCabe
(Quercus) Pp. 272
The two stories, Hello Mr Bones
and Goodbye Mr Rat, share many
similar themes and horror tropes. They can be read in either order and they
meet in the middle, both literally and metaphorically. Hello Mr
Bones concerns a man who was abused as a boy and later becomes a Christian
Brother, only to still be haunted by the undead spirit of his former tormentor.
In Goodbye Mr Rat a woman takes the
ashes of a man back to his hometown in Ireland to be met by a very unwelcoming
committee who cannot forgive his perceived deception and execute their revenge
on the hapless woman.
The tales are both narrated by the unhappy dead, who
are pursuing and tormenting the living; they have selective, ‘convenient
amnesia’ and are highly unreliable. Religion, priests and angels also feature
prominently – these are Irish tales, after all. Naturally where there are
angels, there is evil and abuse. In Goodbye
Mr Rat, Beni Banikin is raised Amish; her mother warns her, “Beware of
rogue angels”, and then she meets Gabriel King, former IRA soldier. But
although they are heavy on religion, the stories are light on faith: bad things
happen to good people for no reason. People act ‘out of character’ and are
‘influenced’ by an evil presence.
Childhood innocence is destroyed through physical abuse, and the
perversion of innocent pop culture references. The image of the evil clown and the
malignant puppet is equated with the torture of children and Ian Brady. From
Sooty and Sweep to Toy Story, the
puppets are pulled by strings of malevolence. In a nightmare relating to
previous traumatic event, Beni sees grimacing figures as though in masks, “As
the commedia dell’arte pictures began
to form.”
Shannon Valentine escapes Ireland to live in Manchester in Hello Mr Bones, where he works as a
teacher and tries to rebuild his life. Gabriel King heads to America where he
lives until dying of prostate cancer in Goodbye
Mr Rat. But one can never leave the past behind. Gabriel is warned that ‘A
frightful fiend doth close behind him tread’. Poetry from Coleridge, Milton,
and particularly Yeats runs through both narratives.
In mid-life, Yeats became
obsessed with Japanese Noh, a form of theatre which utilises a dialogic process
between reality and illusion, the living and the dead, artifice and nature, and
he adopted this style to reinterpret Celtic myths and ancient symbols. After
her mentor explains how, “Noh plays often focus on ghosts seeking release from
passionate sins or errors of judgement committed when living”, Beni writes a successful
drama based on Yeats’ Noh plays.
The masks of Noh theatre are a recurring theme, and the sense of
paranoia is pervasively chilling. Gabriel writes, “There indeed can be few
sensations to compare with that of being watched.” Beni is watched by the
people inside her head and those who break into her room; Valentine Shannon is
watched by Balthazar Bowen, both when he was alive and now he is dead.
Balthazar killed himself after Shannon informed on him, Gabriel turned
informant, and there is a terror in coming forward and telling the truth.
McCabe is certainly macabre. These tales are as psychologically
disturbing as his novel, Winterwood.
It seems that he has an extremely bleak outlook on life, so it is calculated
and creepy when he expresses, “What a magnificent place, I really have to say,
this wondrous world in which we all wander.”
