Reading Kevin Barry is like hanging out with a fun relative at a lavish family wedding; one you're happy to have been pulled aside to listen to, despite the revels and capers all around. From the quasi-Dystopian crime leanings of City of Bohane to the parallel universe-ism of Beatlebone, Barry’s stories have always had a way of intoxicating, obfuscating and enrapturing at the same time, bearing an unpredictable quality, which we nevertheless feel assured leads down interesting pathways.
The deeper he gets into his obsessions, the stronger and more confident he becomes. In his fourth novel The Heart in Winter, all the classic elements of Barry’s storytelling are there—addiction, fairy stories, bar fights, drugs—with an added sensibility reminiscent of the romantic, like Charles Portis’ True Grit or Jack Schaefer’s Shane. Where Portis’ fable has been abstracted through the lens of lost innocence, however, the narrator in Barry’s novel is far more elusive.
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Watch: Kevin Barry reads from The Heart In Winter
Is the narrator’s role in this story meant to ape the voiceover of a Sunday afternoon Western? Does it belong to someone more intimately acquainted with the lovers at the novel’s centre? A relative, perhaps. God? Whomever it is intended to be, it’s hard not to picture Barry’s own face winking at the reader from behind the fabulous venetian mask of his lyricism—wry, grizzled, occasionally wistful or sad.
"Even in the present moment there was a great hauntedness to it all," Barry writes, introducing us to the story’s principal protagonist Tom Rourke. "The city was only this short while confected but it was already strung with a legion of ghosts and Tom Rourke could make them out among the rooftops and he saluted them."
Reading Kevin Barry is like hanging out with a fun relative at a lavish family wedding; one you're happy to have been pulled aside to listen to, despite the revels and capers all around.
There are several electrifying scenes in which the book’s lovers, Tom and Polly, take magic mushrooms and commune with nature; containing within them the same mystical bent and generalised anxiety of Robert Burns 'Tam O’Shanter’ or Christina Rosetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. There are scenes of haruspication in the forest, whispered inhuman voices and strange apparitions in the weather. There are gingerbread houses and gifts borne by strangers and the archetypal terror that folklore has about children lost in darkness.
Despite these classical elements, Barry has done something refreshingly different with the format, adapting some of the same cinematic architecture employed by other modern westerns like HBO’s Deadwood—humour, violence, history, character depth—though there is a certain knowingness contained within the dialogue, something indefinable that renders it Barry’s own:
"They rolled smokes. They got in close to each other.
If we die tonight.
Don’t say it, Polly.
But if we die tonight I wouldn’t even care one way or the other.
I feel much the same way about it."
Even in these few short lines, it’s clear to see that there is something fated about the way Tom and Polly have been drawn to each other; seeming to share a kind of telekinesis that anticipates what one character is going to say before Barry has even written it. Yes, Barry seems to say, Tom and Polly may be similar in terms of manner and speech, though they are imbued through their dialogue with something ineffable, something which gives the characters their connection and emotional depth. We believe that they have known each other for many more years, despite that they only meet around the 40 page mark. Perhaps what makes their connection real is the pain that each of them takes to speak so vulnerably; suggesting implicit, natural trust that has nothing to do with friendship, sentimentality, or sex.
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Listen: The Heart in Winter reviewed on RTÉ Arena
Perhaps there is something elemental about their attraction; about playing Adam and Eve—to borrow from Bob Dylan—around the forests and winter ravages of Frontier-era North America. That indefinable thing that makes love so hard to describe, even more to write and conceptualise it in the wholly convincing way that this book has. Whatever that ingredient is Barry has surely captured it, and as with all other aspects of his writing I can’t quite put my finger on what he has done. All I know is that whatever the mechanics of his storytelling, he makes me care about these lovers and want to lose myself in their adventures.
The Heart In Winter is published by Canongate
