That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

First published in the UK in 2020; publsished by Doubleday on January 12, 2021

Most of the nine stories collected in That Old Country Music are set in western Ireland. They are sweet and sad, funny and tragic. Many are stories are of people in transition surrounded by an unchanging landscape. When a Roma child who speaks no English runs away from Dublin, she loses her fear after meeting an aging hermit in the Ox Mountains and adopts his contemplative life of books and solitude.

Many of the characters are ungrounded. One narrator tells us: “Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.” Others, like the hermit, know exactly where they belong.

One story tells of a song that the narrator hears an old man sing in a nursing home — a song of heartbreak and meanness that tells a story of “erotic wickedness and greed.” Another offers a bartender’s perspective on an overheard conversation between an elderly woman and her aging son — the latest iteration of the same conversation that they have been having for years, until it comes to a bad end.

It is difficult to pick a favorite from this variety of gems, but here are a few that are memorable:

A girl of seventeen (“She was almost eighteen and aching to have a fuck before it”) seduces an English junkie who has gone “astray in the head.” Despite the fierceness of her father’s judgment when word of the scandal leaks, she feels empowered by the knowledge that the man was made to leave the town and will think of her when he “seeks again the needle’s tip and solace.”

A garda, three weeks from retirement, fears that a young nemesis who has been spreading babies across the Ox mountains, not always with the consent of the women he impregnated, will feel no constraints after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. The garda senses that a killing is imminent, but who will the victim be?

A man in Limerick is a “connoisseur of death,” reporting the news of every local who dies, lamenting them all as his city disappears around him. He chats about celebrity deaths, points out potentially fatal hazards, causes people who do not want to confront the inevitable to cross the street when they see him. He is “impressed by death” and by the knowledge that the only death he will be unable to report to others is his own.

The most darkly amusing story is “Roethke in the Bughouse,” set in 1960 when the American poet Theodore Roethke was committed to a psychiatric hospital in western Ireland. Roethke was troubled by the “bits of sheep everywhere” on the island where he stayed, a “mutton necropolis.” The poet was tormented by long nights filled with occult music, but perhaps he was tormented most of all by the words that demanded escape from his body.

As is often true of Irish writers, Kevin Barry has a gift for language. His sentences are those of a skilled artisan. “He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feelings.” “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only a specter of losing it.” “He had the hunted look of rural poverty.” “Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music.” A wandering man tells his life story to an unkempt dog, “a dog that has seen some weather.”

I loved Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier. I suspect he labors long over each sentence he creates. He may not be the most prolific Irish writer, but he’s among the most exquisite prose stylists.

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Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Doubleday on September 17, 2019

Night Boat to Tangier is a story of transitions, bonds broken and restored, losses and recovery. The focus is on two older men and a young woman, although flashbacks also reveal the life of a woman who was with one of the men for twenty years before deciding she had to become a different person.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are in the Algeciras terminal, distributing pictures of Dilly, a pretty girl of 23 who, according to a reluctant source, might be on her way to Tangier. Dilly was raised as Maurice’s daughter and perhaps she is. The two aging Irishmen have not seen her in three years. They roughly question young tourists who look like they might know her, tourists with dreadlocks and dogs, the kind of people (according to a roughly questioned source) with whom she has been traveling.

Maurice and Charlie began to do business in Spain in 1994, the business involving a woman named Karima and some Moroccan hash bound for Cork. Maurice was warned away from the deal by the Brit who explained it to him, but the temptation of riches overcame good judgment. Maurice and Charlie rose above their station too quickly, leading them to hide from time to time. Maurice and his wife had Dilly, made bad investments, assuaged their fear with heroin.

The long friendship of these two men has not been untroubled. The best chapter in the book details a fierce quarrel between the two as seen from the perspective of a bartender in a seedy pub in Cork. Underlying the animosity is Cynthia, Dilly’s mother.

One chapter recounts a conversation between Dilly and Cynthia that changes the course of Dilly’s life, undoubtedly for the better. Another chapter focuses on Dilly in the present, who has changed so much that even if Maurice and Charlie spot her in Algeciras, they might not know her, or they might realize that she is better off without them.

Kevin Barry’s beguiling prose reveals the contradictory natures of Maurice and Charlie, setting them in the piratical history of the Barbary coast while keeping their roots in mythical Ireland: “Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.”

Maurice and Charlie are philosophers of crime who expound with equal ease upon the sweetness of life at its best and the darkness of people at their worst. As they reflect on their lives, Charlies says: “We all have our regrets, Maurice. As older gentlemen.” Both men have much to regret. Life goes by so quickly and so much of it is wasted. Yet life gives us memories we will never regret, and those are the memories that sustain the men as the years advance.

Perhaps the Irish are born with a lyrical prose gene that is unique to their nation. If only for the charm of its language, Night Boat to Tangier is a gift to readers. Its insightful exploration of difficult lives is a bonus.

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Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Published by Doubleday on November 17, 2015

It’s quite a conceit when a writer puts himself into the mind of a famous subject, particularly one who is as complex as John Lennon. “This is the story of his strangest trip,” we are told. The result is an intimate psychological portrait of Lennon at a particular point in his life, with snippets of a biographical portrait of the man and his era.

The story takes place in May 1978. Lennon is 37. He has fame, wealth, children, and a small island off the coast of Ireland that he visits now and then so he will have a secluded place to scream, a place he can be “so fucking lonely that I’ll want to fucking die.” To help him get to the island without being noticed, he hires a fellow named Cornelius O’Grady who often seems to be pursuing an agenda that does not include transporting Lennon to the island.

Cornelius is a blend of philosopher, advisor, and father-confessor. He is a representative of Temptation and Absolution. His wisdom, based on experience and common sense, is deeper than that of the well paid therapist who has advised Lennon to scream his troubles away.

Blending history with fiction, Lennon’s journey with Cornelius takes him to pubs and various other locations, including the Amethyst Hotel, where the Beatles had stayed nine years earlier. Other guests at the Amethyst draw Lennon into one of those confrontational circles where people rant at each other but Lennon has been there, done that. Lennon has learned that “the examined life” is “a pain in the stones.” That segment of the book, however, gives Kevin Barry a chance to dig more deeply into Lennon’s history and psyche.

When about two-thirds of the novel has passed, the author intervenes and, from a first-person perspective, begins to explain his methods of seeking inspiration for the novel. The narrative turns into the history of western Ireland weirdness in the 1970s with bits of literary criticism of Lennon’s writing, details of Lennon’s life, snapshots of Liverpool, the author’s own experience on the island, and the author’s contemplation of the connection between Lennon’s Irish ancestors and his attempt to find a place in the world.

And then, just as jarringly, we’re back to Cornelius and the world of fiction. The setting changes again as the novel nears its conclusion, when we see Lennon in a recording studio. Lennon rambles about his island experiences during a less-than-successful recording session as he tries to capture something new or true, something meaningful in a world where separating meaning from background noise is a daunting challenge.

Barry’s writing style put me off before it drew me in. The opening pages seem aggressively experimental, as if composed on acid, before the prose settles into a purposeful rhythm. I was particularly taken by the dialog, which often delivers low-key hilarity. Most of the novel is written in short paragraphs, save for the ending ramble and occasional extended paragraphs that impart the details of Lennon’s isolated home life, his paranoia, and his inability to write new songs.

I’m not sure that everything works perfectly in Beatlebone (the author’s intrusion struck me as self-indulgent), but most of the novel works quite well. It is a convincing examination of a gifted but troubled mind, a romp through psychology and philosophy, and an astonishing collection of unexpected sentences. The abundant humor (like Lennon) is wry but the novel (like Lennon) suggests that despite past and present struggles, there is always hope for a brighter tomorrow. Of course, as Barry must have intended, we read the novel with Lennon's fate in mind. Hope and reality, the novel reminds us, do not always coincide.

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