Patrick Braden - "sweetness pussy kit-kit" if you must - is the neglected off-spring of a mother he's barely met and the local Catholic priest who raped her. It's not the best start in life, but young Patrick seems hell-bent on making his time in Tyreelin as hard as possible. There's nothing he likes more, for example, that doling up in his foster-sister's dresses, caking on her make-up and wigging out to Dusty Springfield. (McCabe lifts his title from Don Partridge's 1969 chart hit.) "A belted sweater in yummy plum to match your crushed velvet hot pants," Patrick Braden constructs for himself a new identity as Pussy, a 16-year-old rent boy with a touch of Lynsey de Paul about him. It's the early 70s, just south of the Irish border, and a transvestite is not absolutely the thing to be.

Breakfast on Pluto is told in dozens of short, highly! exclamatory! chapters! Pussy remembers his life in prose every bit as flamboyant as his life, written down at the behest of his poor, tortured psychiatrist, Terence. That's McCabe playing with words again and why his book is only partially successful. Again. And since this is his period, he feels the need to lard the text up with nostalgic fat (Larry Grayson, Skol lager, the novelty that was Polaroid) to disguise the paucity of his - and our - emotional engagement.

It's all the more noticeable then that the book works best when McCabe's "nutty little fairy" gets out of that Irish melee and moves briefly to London ("the flashing console colours of this most wondrous city") at the height of that decade's IRA atrocities. This is strong meat, realised in a semi-comic tone that lifts the narrator out of his/her self-absorption. McCabe calls this his most political book and you can see why. The Troubles background the thing. Pussy has an affair with a local politician who is blown apart in a car bomb. A childhood friend called Irwin becomes an active IRA member before he's murdered as an informer. His girlfriend, Charlie, Pussy's confident, has a breakdown in the aftermath. And in London, a pub is bombed and Pussy arrested as a suspect.

There's a clever, very moral seam at the heart of this book that struggles to be heard. You get the impression again and again that McCabe is trying to tell us something (about tolerance? about alienation? about the division of the personal and the political in a time and a place like this?) but he's too wrapped up in himself to make it heard. The Dead School was a big advance on The Butcher Boy, but this is, sadly, one long backwards step.