I'll often sit in winterwood for hours...maybe just humming a few bars of 'Scarlet Ribbons', watching all the little ribbons as they flutter in the breeze. In the timeless beauty of our winterwood home.
Winterwood tells the story of Redmond Hatch, a journalist who returns to his roots in the West of Ireland. In his home place of Slievenageeha, he comes under the spell of Ned 'Auld Pappie' Strange, a fiddling, story-telling mountainy man. Is Ned a gas ticket or something a lot more frightening? The storyline follows Hatch's descent from family man in the economically depressed Ireland of the 80s to mentally unstable drifter in the boom times of the Ireland in the Noughties.
Hatch's convoluted narration, with his self-consciously "educated" vocabulary, shows his dislocation from his background, and ultimately from reality. He idealises his wife and daughter, trying maintain a perfect happiness that steadily becomes creepier and creepier. As his life fragments, he starts to emulate Auld Pappie. His reaction to the changes in his life and in the society around him is to obsessively dwell on the old fashioned mountain life of his early childhood.
Only McCabe could imbue such a disturbing narrative with black humour. This dark and twisted novel is by far his best book since The Butcher Boy. The sinster story got under my skin in a way few stories do. This is brilliant and disturbing and a must-read for any fans of contemporary Irish fiction.
