In England in the early 1970s Glam Rock is in full swing, and so too is the IRA bombing campaign. After one such attack, Pussy gets dragged (sorry!) in by the bobbies on suspicion of Provo membership, when his cross-dressing is misinterpreted as a more sinister disguise. Breakfast on Pluto is The Life and Times of Patrick Braden, written at the behest of his favourite psychiatrist, Dr Terence, as a therapeutic measure.
While the idea of rebuking the violently macho world of terrorism by juxtaposing it with an apolitical, camp transsexual is a deliciously subversive idea (redolent of Neil Jordan’s procedure in The Crying Game, and Manuel Puig’s in The Kiss of The Spider Woman), here the manner of the weave is not as seamless as it might be. But then again, maybe this awkwardness is justified, since neither is the matter it enfolds. Liberties are taken with such traditional staples of the novel as plot and character development, tone and point of view (sometimes Pussy writes about himself in the first person, sometimes in the third, and when he uses the latter he oscillates between ‘he’ and ‘she’), but that’s all fine with me.
What is more worrying is that the narrative voice of Pussy Braden is disturbingly similar to that of Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy, (for example, ‘the Patrick Braden ALL-IRELAND FUNCTIONAL FAMILY OF THE CENTURY AWARD’ sounds an awful lot like ‘The Francie Brady Not A Bad Bastard Any More Diploma’). Even their surnames are almost the same. All of which leads one to suspect that the narrative voice in these books is that of McCabe himself. Also, while the clergy undoubtedly had it coming to them, after so long an abuse of power and authority, one can hardly pick up a book or watch a film by an Irish writer or director these days which does not contain an obligatory scene of clerical sex crime, and criticising the Catholic Church in Ireland has become, as Joseph O’Connor declared recently, as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Wouldn’t it better to just let them crawl off and die out, quietly?
These criticisms aside, Breakfast on Pluto is well worth the price of admission, if only for the way it is drenched in the music of the time. Neil Jordan has already bought the film rights, so hopefully we can look forward to another cinematic treat, a collaboration between these two highly inventive minds whose concerns and methods are so alike.

First published in The World of Hibernia