He gave up drinking for 10 years, but has the odd glass now, partly intrigued by the new language of craft beers. You have a sense of that possibility talking to him. “Back then, and still a little today, you can walk into some of those bars and be in a different dimension completely,” says McCabe.
Some days later Whitehead awoke in bed next to a beautiful red-headed woman he didn’t know, minus all of his camera equipment. Within half an hour they had all hitched a lift on a horse and cart to start a pub crawl. He found them in their favourite bar one lunchtime. In the late 60s he came over to Dublin to make a promo film for Top of the Pops with the Irish folk band the Dubliners. By way of example, he reminds me of the story of the avant garde film-maker Peter Whitehead, chronicler of the Rolling Stones.
In the surreal days of 1960s “happenings”, McCabe suggests, the Irish had a head start. Once you get tuned to McCabe’s brilliant playful wavelength, after a couple or three pages, you find yourself at home in Aunty Nano’s famous late-night club – “the land of Ziggy Stardust and Enoch Powell and Mike Yarwood” – and spending too much time at the “premier crash pad in all of north London”, paradiso or inferno, depending on your politics. The drama of the book reconstructs the world of 1970s Irish London – Soho and Kilburn in particular – which Una’s mind insists on reinhabiting. The narrator, Dan Fogarty, is looking after his sister, Una, who is suffering with dementia in a hotel-cum-nursing home in Margate. In the days before I met McCabe its voices had taken root in my head.
The occasion for our lunch is McCabe’s new book, Poguemahone, an extraordinary 600-page free verse novel, already hailed in the Observer as “this century’s Ulysses”. Seated in the Canal Bar with pints of Guinness each, we order the specials, stroganoff for him, roast dinner for me.
When I suggested lunch to him, he wrote back to suggest we might run to a “bacon sammidge”. McCabe is pathologically wary of pretence. When The Butcher Boy was published in 1992, the irrepressible, murderous voice of Francie Brady established a new macabre magic realism for these provincial hinterlands. His second novel, Carn, recreated a thinly disguised Clones. In the pantheon of storied Irish writers – Joyce in Dublin, Yeats on the west coast – McCabe has a special place as the conjuror of the small-town middle. After many years living away, in London and on the coast at Sligo, the novelist again lives close enough to the hotel that when, after driving the couple of hours up from Dublin, I call him to tell him I’m in the Canal Bar, he wanders in, a big grin behind his beard, a couple of minutes later. Patrick McCabe, the novelist, creator of The Butcher Boy 30 years ago, grew up in a terrace of houses just along the street from here, and at 67 is old enough to remember the days when the maitre d’ at the Creighton greeted you at the portico with a carnation in his buttonhole. The Creighton is a grand Victorian railway hotel that lost elements of its stateliness when the railway station at Clones closed in 1957. Regular couples and groups of old friends have got here early for the blackboarded specials, the beef stroganoff or the Easter roast beef and are already on to sponge pudding. A t one o’clock on a Thursday lunchtime there’s not a seat to be had in the Canal Bar at the Creighton Hotel in Clones, up near the border in the midlands of Ireland.