Book review: The best of Kevin Barry’s novels to date

'The Heart in Winter' is a realistic take on the Western, avoiding cliches and emphasising the dangers and discomforts of outlaw life

Kevin Barry visited Butte, Montana, in 1999, a locality long associated with the hardy miners of the Beara peninsula, who moved there en masse when the copper mines of Allihies closed down. File picture: Michael Mac Sweeney/Provision

• The Heart in Winter 
• Kevin Barry 
• Canongate, €16.99 

It’s been a long wait. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier, an Irish bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and named among the top-10 books of the year by the New York Times.

But it is 20 years since the idea of an Irish Western set among the immigrant miners of Butte, Montana, struck Barry. 

He visited Butte in 1999, a locality long associated with the hardy miners of the Beara peninsula, who moved there en masse when the copper mines of Allihies closed down.

Meanwhile, Barry has been recognised as one of the most exciting short story writers, with three collections. 

His readings are legendary, made memorable by his dramatic delivery. 

He published two other highly acclaimed novels, City of Bohane, winner of the Dublin Literary Award in 2011, when it was worth an impressive €100,000; and Beatlebone, which won the Goldsmiths Prize for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”.

The long wait was worth it. The Heart in Winter again “breaks the mould”, and is, like its description of Butte, Montana, in 1891, “screeching and loud as the depths of hell”. 

The reader needs a high tolerance of “bad language”, explicit sex and violence, as well as a robust sense of humour to enjoy this gripping and touching novel.

The author’s relish for language and his quirky humour are evident everywhere, for example in the names of Butte’s Irish bars: the Pay Day, the Board of Trade, the Graveyard, the Alley Cat, the Open-All-Night.

The novel is a realistic take on the Western, avoiding cliches and emphasising the dangers and discomforts of outlaw life. 

First we meet 29-year-old Tom Rourke, from Berehaven, who, having lasted only three hours down the mine, works by day as a photographer’s assistant, and by night is a doper, a drunkard, a “botherer of whores” and a dreamer, composer of bar room ballads, making a few bucks by writing letters for his drinking companions. 

“The father’s people were respectable. The mother’s were the grass of two cows…” in the words of the sheriff of Butte, Stephen Devane of Glengarriff, County Cork.

Physically Rourke is not impressive: “He was thin and whippety, kind of, and he had eyes that were real bright, like some elfin creature just crawl out of a forest tale of the olden times. But she liked his voice and clothes and his nutty smile, the way it lit up his face, all lantern bright.”

“She” is the woman he falls in love with, Polly Gillespie, a fearless and amoral orphan, who has herself been wooed by letter, and comes to Butte, supposedly a respectable virgin, to marry Long Anthony Harrington, a mining captain, religious, teetotal and flagellant. 

Her colourful past is only hinted at, but she is clearly a match for Tom in deviousness and daring. 

Polly marries Long Anthony straight off the train, and the next day goes to a photographic studio to have her portrait taken. This is where she meets Tom, who is smitten.

The captain’s job alternates days and nights, and Rourke visits Polly whenever it is safe. They have a telepathic contact: love hits them like a thunderbolt and they decide to run away together. 

Rourke sets fire to the Zagreb Boarding House, where he rooms, steals $600 and a palomino, and lights out into the Montana winter with his woman. 

Prepare for an unforgettable ride. This is by far the best of Kevin Barry’s novels.

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