Watching Kevin Barry’s progress over the years has been a pleasure. His first novel, City of Bohane, flamboyant with tribal vernacular and savagery, was followed by Beatlebone, a beguiling surreal odyssey, and then Night Boat to Tangier, where two tired old crims wait and talk their way through the dark hours. Escaping Beckett’s long shadow, the vigil had a hint of redemption. Never has the lawless life been depicted with such wry sweetness.
What Barry celebrates above all is language, swooping from desolation to deadpan mirth in a phrase. Pain that lies too deep for tears can be assuaged by laughter. The award-winning novels were interspersed with collections of short stories, prize-winners resonant with the hidden music of the old country. And now we have The Heart in Winter, Barry’s first historical novel, set in 1891 in Butte, Montana, ‘a town of whores and chest infections’. This is the wild west, but with a shamrock twist – the Irish flocking in to work the copper mines alongside immigrants from all over Europe. The rough, raw texture of life, with its violence and casual debauchery, is manifest on every page; but Barry’s glinting, swerving way with words brings poetry to the grilling of bacon and the slicing of liver – and of limbs.
Tom Rourke is a bar-room balladeer, earning what he needs for dope and booze by writing letters for illiterate losers seeking a wife. When sober, he helps out the town’s photographer. One day Polly Gillespie, a mail-order bride from Chicago, steps off the train to marry a well-to-do, God-fearing local.
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