FICTION

THE BUTCHER BOY by Patrick McCabe (Fromm International: $19.95; 215 pp.) The adage that even paranoiacs have enemies finds its perfect illustration in this novel by another young Irish writer. Francie Brady, the “butcher boy” of the title--he has worked at a slaughterhouse and murdered a schoolmate’s mother--has been an outcast all his life. Given the total of his escalating offenses, it’s no wonder that people in his village have turned against him. But because Francie tells the story, we understand that being cast out has unhinged his mind and made it almost inevitable that he turn to crime.

Francie’s father is an alcoholic. His mother is mentally ill; after Francie’s first boyhood transgression--he runs away to Dublin, steals a little money and buys candy bars--she commits suicide. The neighbors label them “pig people.” Francie has a close friend, Joe Purcell, and a model of middle-class normality in the schoolmate, Philip Nugent, but both these relationships wither as the other boys’ parents come to see Francie as a bad influence. In reform school, Francie vows to go straight, but this dream ends when a pederast priest tries to seduce him. In a heartbreaking scene, he visits a seaside resort where his parents honeymooned and, he believes, experienced a moment of true love, but this illusion, too, is strangled.

Patrick McCabe (“Music on Clinton Street,” “Carn”) achieves a rare balance in this novel. It’s as bright as it is depressing, as funny as it is gruesome. We see Francie clearly as a psychopath, and we ache with sympathy for him. It’s almost impossible to pinpoint the moment in his growing up when the imagination of an ordinary boy shades over into something dangerously loony. The key is Francie’s slangy, angry, ‘60s-flavored voice, which McCabe renders with a minimum of punctuation and a maximum of control.