The Holy City by Patrick McCabe

If you can remember the 1960s, as they say, you weren't there. Chris McCool's problem, in The Holy City , is that he never quite left them. Living in the past, he now seems to be having some trouble separating memory from make-believe. Well into his own 60s, and having spent time in and out of psychiatric care, the would-be dandy looks back with increasing confusion on his heyday in a whirl of Lulu, Roger Moore and Carnaby Street – or as much of that whirl as made it to his small Irish village of Cullymore. This is familiar Patrick McCabe territory, at once darkly comic and indefinably sinister, with a demented, hallucinatory narrator and an addled plot that teasingly reveals its allegorical crises, veiled desires and cultural confusions.