Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

Central to Francie's grasp of his place in society is his relationship with

the Nugents, a middle-class Irish family recently returned from London, who are
associated with the "trappings and aspirations of middle-class England" and who
"represent everything unavailable to Francie."50 They therefore come to represent a
state of being he both covets and rejects. While the Nugents, "whose family name
signifies both their colonial superiority and their modernizing impact,"51 would in
thenselves have determined little of Francie's unfolding fate, they nevertheless
come to loom large in his consciousness. Francie's obsessive paranoia over the
Nugents is suggested as early as the novel's first sentence, which ends with
Franie's reference to "what I done on Mrs Nugent" (1). Indeed, in Francie's mind
all roads lead to the Nugent family conspiracy: it is not any shortcoming on the
part of the Bradys but persecution at the hands of the Nugents that leads to the
disintegration of Francie's world. "If only the Nugents hadn't come to the town, if
only they had left us alone" (178), Francie thinks, echoing his father's blaming of
him (and his mother) for his family's woes. Making matters worse in Francie's mind
is the fact that the Nugents formerly were friends of the Bradys but then, after
their English sojourn, betrayed them.
McCabe's novel establishes the Bradys and the Nugents as mirrior images of
each other. As Tom Herron puts it, "The Nugents possess everything Francie does not
and embody everything he is not" ; his life-style is the "antithesis" of theirs.52
Both families consist of a father, mother, and son, but the two families, beyond
this point of similarity, could not be more dissimilar. This mirror imaging is
emphasized when Mrs Nugent informs Francie of his own mother's death (and that he
has missed the funeral) (45). It is also emphasized when Francie breaks into the
Nugent's home, dons Philip's English private school uniform, and admires himself in
the mirror of Philip's bedroom, pretending to be his nemesis (63). The Nugent's
pleasant middle-class home life, replete with "refinement, reserve, restraint,
taste, and order" - "the stereotypical English traits on which the old Celt versus
Saxon dichotomy depended, qualities that for centuries had presumably made the
English eminently suited to govern the Irish"53 - all contrast starkly with the
Bradys''impoverished, uncouth, and acrimonious domestic life.
In contrasy to the Nugent's Kitchen, for example, which is "warm and glowing"
and contains a table "set for breakfast in the morning," a "butter dish with a
special knife," a "jug with matching cups," and "not a thing out of place" (47),
the Brady kitchen is fly-covered and pilchard-strewn, an unkempt and dirty place
where meals are prepared for Francie irregularly if at all. In contrast to Mr
Nugent's "high-up" London job, steady sobriety, and well-groomed appearance - like
an "ad on the television" (57) - Francie's father is the epitome of indolence,
drunkenness, and sloth. The neglect and

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