Book of a lifetime: The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

From The Independent archive: Ross Raisin finds himself inhibited and then inspired by the Irish writer’s dark tour de force. A descent into a disordered mind – the reader is shocked before feeling ‘a terrible compassion’

Patrick McCabe’s novel ‘The Butcher Boy’ won the 1992 Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize (PA)

I had never heard of The Butcher Boy until about seven or eight years ago, as I was beginning my first novel. An Irish friend of mine read some of my early pages and suggested that I might enjoy the book, that it might inspire me. He was right – I enjoyed it massively – but rather than inspire me, I initially found myself inhibited by it.

I could see that I was trying for similar things to those which the novel achieves – the total absorption into a disordered mind; the blurring of the real and the imagined; the madness and chicanery of the small town, to name a few – but if that book exists and does all those things better than I possibly could then how, I wondered for a time, could I go forward?