SOURCE: “Master Class,” in Observer, No. 10622, May 21, 1995, p. 15.

In the following review, Balmer discusses the randomness of fate in McCabe's The Dead School.

Patrick McCabe used to walk up and down Kilburn High street in search of a happy ending. He was turning over the idea that there might be a gentle way out of the blackness of his new novel, The Dead School. The men living on the pavement outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop would shout: ‘Hey pal, got any money?’ They could have stepped out of his book. Or perhaps they stepped into it. The happy ending, at any rate, was nowhere in sight.

Patrick McCabe made his name with The Butcher Boy, about madness: black, funny, an Irish gothic novel (shortlisted for the 1992 Booker prize). He says that what he was doing in that book was writing about a ‘pocket universe’. The Dead School...