Description:

Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo – a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible. Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland’s most original contemporary writers. ‘McCabe slowly transforms his unreliable narrator from a campy Austin Powers-like figure to a sick creep with a violent streak. [A] mesmerizing but unsettling read.’ ― Booklist ‘Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his storytelling powers are in full flow in The Holy City’ ― Guardian ‘A hall of mirrors [McCool’s] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe’s engaging lyricism’ ― The Times ### From Publishers Weekly McCabe (*Winterwood*) delivers a claustrophobic indictment of failed peace and love, as seen through the eyes of a nut job Irish baby boomer. C.J. Pops McCool, the illegitimate son of a wealthy, married housewife, is raised by a surrogate mother in the Nook, a plot of land buried deep within his birth mother's estate. However, when candy-striped blazers and the Kinks enter his world, McCool dives headlong into the swinging lifestyle, developing an unhealthy attachment to a Nigerian teenager and dating an older woman. As McCool's cultural obsessions grow out of control, he acts on a taboo impulse and starts a chain of events that leads to his institutionalization. Nearly 40 years later, living with a doting wife, McCool attempts to reconcile his youth with his supposedly cured present state. At turns irate, mystified and nostalgic, McCool's reminiscences stand as a haunting rejoinder to his youth's groovy promise. McCabe's dynamic and flawed antihero is a creepy delight, the perfect guide to some very dark material. *(Jan.)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Booklist Chris McCool, former dairy farmer and perennial “hep cat,” is still in love with the swinging sixties. He spends his days listening to Dusty Springfield, buying vintage clothing on eBay, and clubbing with his Croatian girlfriend. He grew up as the bastard child of a married Protestant and her Catholic lover in the rural Dublin suburb of Cullymore. As a result of his emotionally damaged childhood, he embraced the sixties as a way to break free of his low social standing and tortured views on religion and sex. Dressed in crushed-velvet pants, driving a Ford Cortina, and carrying on with the flirtatious Dolly Mixtures, Chris thought he had found the perfect route out of his small, constricted hometown ways until he developed an unhealthy obsession with a pious Nigerian boy from the local Catholic school. McCabe slowly transforms his unreliable narrator from a campy Austin Powers–like figure to a sick creep with a violent streak. This mesmerizing but unsettling read will appeal to fans of McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto (1999) and Winterwood (2007). --Joanne Wilkinson