A fine Irish horse opera
Coll Coyle is to be evicted with his child and pregnant wife for a reason we do not learn until a stray line in the last couple of pages. Coyle confronts the landlord, Hamilton, who is on horseback and tries to reason with him. Coyle knocks Hamilton from the horse setting off a chain of events that sees Coyle flee to Philadelphia pursued by Hamilton’s man, the philosophical and psychotic Faller.
There is an elemental quality to the writing where characters, the dead and the living, find themselves caught up in the almost animate vagaries of the weather and the earth around them. A muscular and opulent language is used to give a highly sensual quality to the places where the story unfolds. A cinematic quality is found in moments like the first fall of rain after days of back-breaking work by parched railway workers in Philadelphia.
