‘I’ve completely landed in Twin Peaks here’
Kevin Barry
Jonathan Cape, €13.99; ebook, €16.64
KEVIN BARRY’S writing is the kind that leaves you snorting in laughter. His first collection of short stories bagged a Rooney Prize for Literature in 2007.
Following on from his debut novel, City of Bohane, last year, he has just released another set of stories entitled Dark Lies the Island.
The island houses an assortment of dreamers, hucksters and losers, who talk in a wonderful amalgam of tongues — from hardboiled and Hiberno-English to pavee and punk. Most of them, however, are in various states of distress or at the mercy of outrageous misfortune.
Donie’s father, for example, was a great walker — “he walked five miles daily a loop of the Lough Key forest park, among the ferns and the ancient oaks, across the fairy bridge and back again. Then the knees went on the father — the two simultaneously — and he could walk no more.
“Oh, I have a predicament now,” he would say from the armchair, looking out at Boyle; the slow afternoons. The weight piled up on the father quickly. He turned into a churn of butter on the armchair. He took a heart attack inside the year.
“My father,” Donie tells people, “died of a predicament of the knees.’”
“Pretty much always I write comedies,” says Barry. “They are often very dark comedy, very bleak. Some of my own favourite stuff as a reader would be going towards the comedy. Even writers that I was in love with in my 20s — Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and so on — all those novels I was reading are at some level comedies. I always think it’s the highest form. Any aul eejit can write a tragedy.
“When the reader is reading a story of mine, my ideal reaction from the reader is to laugh all the way through and then at the end of the story to turn and ask, ‘What in the name of Jesus was I laughing at?’”
In Fjord of Killary, a story which was previously published in The New Yorker, its protagonist has washed up at the foot of Mweelrea mountain, having bought a hotel under romantic delusions; the estate agent had, he laments, “gussied up the history of the place”. He’s not well liked by the locals for his “superior” attitude. His minimum-waged Belarusian staff, who are shagging each other “at all angles of the clock”, despise him.
His muse has escaped him (he is “at roughly the midpoint of what, for poets, would be termed ‘a long silence’” — five years had passed since his last collection) and the storm-ridden Atlantic Ocean is threatening to engulf his inn, although it’s something that doesn’t overly faze his bar clients, among them John Murphy, an undertaker who’d bury anything that moves.
“He was thrun down,” John Murphy said, speaking of a man he had lately buried. “He went into himself. He didn’t talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a burnt rasher. You’d visit and he’d say nothin’ to you but he’d know you were there alright. The little eyes would follow you around the room.”
“Age was he when he went, John?”
“Forty-two.”
“Youngish?”
“Arra. He was better off out of it.”
In Wistful England, Daniel is a forlorn 25-year-old Irish guy pining for his ex-girlfriend while holed up in a house in east London which he shares with three “peaceful alcoholics” from Connemara. It was not, he remarks, “a house in which to talk about the heart”, while the atmosphere in his local pub is foul.
“‘You was born ignorant,’ said an old West Indian, bickering with an ‘old Irish’ about which channel to watch on the satellite buy-in. ‘It’s your poor wife I feel pain for. She deserves better. A good-lookin’ lady. And she get hersel’ a pig for a man … he who come in here, with his red face …’ The West Indian stood then — he was most elegantly waistcoated, he was dapper… ‘he who come in here, in his unpleasant jacket.’”
Barry, who was born in 1969, grew up in Limerick city. He tried university, but left after about a week and a half. He took up a job offer as a cub reporter for a local newspaper that had started up in the city. “In the late ’80s, a job was almost a newsworthy event,” he says. His beat was the district courts, corporation meetings and other miscellanea.
“I remember doing a feature about a private investigator in Limerick,” he says. “He was a piece of work, this fella. He took me out. We were apparently on a stake-out, trying to spot some fella’s wife having a fling. It was just bananas. We had these binoculars out while we were seated in a Fiat 127. I wrote up a complete Private Eye report which would have put Raymond Chandler to shame.
“It was great craic. There’s a certain generation of Irish journalists — I was at the tail end of it — who got interested in journalism through things like the Watergate film in the ’70s. You’d have this notion of yourself as this kind of Woodward or Bernstein. Then you realise you’re actually reporting about the price of turnips in Limerick or some guy getting six months for hitting another fella a box outside a disco. It’s not quite the Washington Post.”
Barry left Limerick in 1993. His wanderings took him all over, including Spain, Edinburgh in Scotland, the East and West coasts in the States and Liverpool and London. In 2006, he put down roots of a sort (he still likes to get out of the country in the winter) when, along with his girlfriend — now his wife — he bought an old RIC barracks in south county Sligo.
“It’s unbelievably quiet,” he says. “I ride my bike and go out around the lake on a weekday morning and you literally go an hour and not pass a car. It’s a brilliant place to dream away the days, but you need frequent trips to the city — to see streets and pigeons and stuff — as well to keep the old balance.
“We’re just on Lough Arrow, which has the highest incidents of UFO sightings in Europe. Now most of the sightings were by the same woman. She actually passed away a year or two ago. The sightings have dropped off, but I’m watching the skies. I’m keeping an open mind in her blessed memory.
“I remember when we moved up here, picking up our local newspaper, the Roscommon People, as our nearest metropolis is Boyle, Co Roscommon, and looking at the local notes page. Going down it, you had bridge club; hillwalking club; under 14s camogie; and UFO Society. I thought it was fantastic — I’ve completely landed in Twin Peaks here.
“What I find going around the place — being out in Mayo or up in Donegal — the older people still have a real sweetness about them and the young fellas are pure savages, but maybe it was always thus. Maybe it is age brings the sweetness in. I find you definitely get slightly scared by what’s coming down river,” he says, laughing.
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