The Dead School - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

3.65

913 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330339451 ISBN 13: 9780330339452

Publisher: Pan MacMillan, 1996

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Malachy Dudgeon has escaped the misery and madness of his childhood home and landed a job in the most famous school in Dublin. The headmaster, Raphael Bell, has overcome his own tragedies to forge a model career, but when Malachy Dudgeon and Raphael Bell meet, they become inextricably engaged in a macabre relationship which proves fatal to their fortunes and their sanity.

‘McCabe can make you howl at the darkest antics... He never sets a foot – or syllable – wrong. His novel is death on a laugh-support machine. Stupendous.’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Raphael, the great headmaster, is a marvellous creation... McCabe has a charm as a storyteller which is all his own’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Exhilarating. Reading the distilled gouts of consciousness which pour from the minds of these characters is like being trapped on a big dipper with articulate maniacs... Horribly funny’ The Times

‘An appallingly funny story... horribly memorable’ Times Literary Supplement

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Review:

"All it takes is one thing to go wrong and then--well everything else decides to follow suit I'm afraid. Mr Sun, who a minute before was saying, 'Hello! I'm Mr Sun! I'm your friend on this happy picnic day!' is opening up a big sunny mouth full of razor teeth." Macabre humor, grisly horrors, likeable characters, madness and pathos, shrewd allusions to pop songs and movies, and a supple prose style that sounds like Irish speech when read aloud--Patrick McCabe does it all. The Dead School is a dazzling novel, more complex and even more gripping than McCabe's The Butcher Boy. Here are the stories of two very different Irishmen, from different generations, whose lives intersect for a brief and mutually destructive time, and then continue, in misery, apart. McCabe deftly avoids the easy or dramatic ending and delivers instead the saddest, funniest, most horrible ending of all because it is so true to life.

From the Publisher:

From the award-winning author of The Butcher Boy comes a new novel of extraordinary power that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "confirm[s] McCabe's standing as one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland."

In The Dead School, Patrick McCabe returns to the emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland to explore the inner lives of two men: a headmaster and a schoolteacher, each man the product of a soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons of loss and betrayal. Tension coils--until tragedy strikes a young student in their charge, and the latent despair and rage that has festered in their hearts explodes onto the page. As in The Butcher Boy, McCabe demonstrates his remarkable command of the vernacular and an uncanny ability to pinpoint the exact moment when ordinary minds take flight into madness. Equally compelling, equally heartbreaking in its impact, The Dead School has established McCabe as one of the most celebrated writers of literary fiction today.

"A spellbinding story of betrayal and broken dreams narrated to a wonderfully menacing effect...the sheer force of his language...positively thrums with life."--Los Angeles Times

"The Dead School makes compelling literature....The writing is seamless, the effect shocking: Imagine Apocalypse Now cheerfully narrated by Jimmy Stewart."--The Seattle Times

"McCabe [is] as skilled and significant a novelist as Ireland has produced in decades."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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