How a young and overweight Una finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family.
One can only hope Poguemahone attracts a readership beyond its crowdfunding backers on Unbound because, in its haunting strangeness and blazing originality, it deserves far more than a cult following.Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. With few exceptions, the novel in verse doesn’t much appeal to today’s mainstream publishers, and this is not only because verse novels are often awful, but also because even the good ones rarely find a large audience. As things darken there are fewer laughs, and the final pages are almost unbearably tense. The first half in particular is marvellously fresh and underwrought. Poguemahone is, in content and execution, frequently astonishing, and galloping through a very long novel at the rate of three pages per minute is an exhilarating sensory experience.
But compare the same extract presented as straight tting it out as prose makes it clear how artfully the material has been handled. My initial reaction was equivocal because, on a first reading, this lacks the punch and depth of poetry. These memories, as recounted by Dan, are by turns hilarious and quite terrifying, moving fluently between the comic grotesqueries of Withnail and I and the ontological horror of The Exorcist. a bleakly comic, wildly original 600-page epic about loss, exile and mental illness, written almost entirely in lightly punctuated free verse.
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