A raucous mix of double crosses, brothels, triple crosses, and cocktail recipes, Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is a dark, twisted, and picaresque tale, a transgressive black comedy like no other.Joe Chambers is a CIA operative working in Dublin. Assigned to an agency-fronted publishing house, his problems include, but are not limited to, errant MI6 agents, a Francoist dwarf, insane profit-making … insane profit-making schemes, and a tapeworm named Steve. Utterly reprehensible, he is the perfect guide to this bizarre and repulsive journey into Dublin’s gutters.
Jay Spencer Green presents a twisted and exaggerated – but wholly recognizable – vision of Dublin, a place where cat’s cheese salad and a dubious pork/human hybrid meat share the menu, where mass canine culling is a hobby for the masses, and where clowns, chuggers, and carneys form the heart of the resistance. It is a Dublin of no redemption.
Winner of the 2015 Lord of the Book Covers award. Voted No. 6 in the 50 Top Indie Books of 2015.more
Joe Chambers runs Whetstone Publishing. Dublin-based, it’s a sort of super-clippings agency that produces abstracts of what’s published around the world and sells them to wealthy corporate subscribers. Joe’s not what he seems, though. He’s American. Whetstone is actually a CIA front company. And Joe is a Company operative sent into this backwater job thanks to “one lousy indiscretion eight years ago with a bottle of Metaxa, a tub of Starbucks Java ice cream, and the spouse of a European leader.”
Trouble is, Dublin’s not a sinecure anymore. Because Joe’s under pressure to cut costs. In fact the book begins with a tense online meeting between Joe and his superior in New York, the Chief of International Trade (United States). Or to use her full acronym, COITUS. And things sort of go downhill from there, until Joe’s up to his neck in vice and crime. Not that that stops him jotting down cocktail recipes now and then. (My favourite was The JFK: 1 oz. Green Spot Irish Whiskey, 8 oz. Tomato Juice, 4 oz. Cuban Rum, Three slugs of Harvey’s.)
Jay Spencer Green’s Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is very funny. I have rather a dry sense of humour, and I suspect I laughed less than most readers. But I still had some serious snort-my-coffee moments, including one or two while riding on the New York subway at rush hour (and trust me, that doesn’t happen often). Joe’s CIA drinking companion Frank, torturemeister from the US Embassy, refusing to watch tennis: “If I’ve got to watch two lesbians grunting and squealing, I expect at least one of them to be wearing a strap-on.” Asked how he got on with a date the night before: “Excellent. I’ve always liked Stiff Little Fingers. Just never had them up my ass before.” Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is not only funny; it’s also filthy.
But it’s also very dark. We’re in a dystopian Dublin in what seems to be the very near future, cynical, with everything for sale. In passing, we hear that troops have shot 15 Travelers dead near Kells; and that they drive around the city at night, spraying homeless people with sewage so that they’ll inspire disgust and will be easier to persecute. It gets worse. A virus strikes the pork industry and the government takes action to save the pigs: “For years, pigs’ organs had been used to keep human patients alive. Why not the reverse? Who’s going to miss a few winos and Travelers so long as there’s bacon on the plate of a Sunday morning? China showed us the way years ago, executing criminals to order.” Late in the book things start to take an even more sinister turn, with bombs and disorder that have a murky purpose. Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is very funny, but I wondered to what extent Green wanted the readers to laugh, or to think about the world post-2008 crash, and where it’s going.
I think he mainly wants to make us laugh. Even so, the black humour is part of a book that is intelligent and subversive as well as funny. As Joe’s friend Delia says at one point: “It’s what’s known as gallows humor, Joe, Gallows being a small town in Scotland where Methodists go for their annual comedy festival.”