At 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. 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. The Creighton is a grand Victorian railway hotel that lost elements of its stateliness when the railway station at Clones closed in 1957. 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. 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.
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. His second novel, Carn, recreated a thinly disguised Clones. 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.
