The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Emerald Germs of Ireland by Patrick McCabeDavid Bergman
Patrick McCabe. Emerald Germs of Ireland. Harper Collins, 2001. 306 pp. $25.00.
If Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho were transplanted to Ireland, scored with a combination of folk and pop melodies, and given a comic twist, you’d have Emerald Germs of Ireland, the latest novel by Patrick McCabe. The Norman Bates of the novel is named Pat McNab, "one of life’s unfortunates," who kills his mother because, like the stereotypical Irish mother-cooing either infantilizations or ball-crushing ridicule and humiliation-she’ll never leave her son alone, especially after he murders his tyrannical father. Once she’s gone, he misses her terribly. Luckily for him, she keeps reappearing to give him her sage advice and encouragement. Having dispatched his parents, Pat has a go at the neighbors, who disappear as quickly as cabs in a thunderstorm. When he turns his home into a bed-and-breakfast, the guests find checkout time comes a bit earlier than they expected. Still, no one ever gets suspicious about these missing people or the increasing number of bushes Pat plants at night in his back garden. Emerald Germs of Ireland is a slightly stale pastiche, purchased at the postmodern pasticherie for, I hope, half price. From early on in the novel-right after he kills Mrs. Tubridy, Pat’s nosey and lascivious elderly neighbor-I was waiting for him to show up in his mother’s clothes for one of the murders, and sure enough, about fifty pages from the end, he bludgeons his former schoolmaster, Mr. Halpin, in "a wig both sad and lifeless" while carrying "a once vivacious bouquet of flowers long since faded to the land of sepia." Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil in regard to that other mass murderer Adolph Eichmann; Patrick McCabe shows us the drabness of insanity, for even Pat McNab’s hallucinations are painfully unoriginal. [David Bergman]