"That old country music" by Kevin Barry (Canongate, 2021)

Stories from New Yorker, Irish Times, etc. I wasn't impressed by any of them. The dialogue's jolly enough I suppose.

• The coast of Leitrim - Quiet Seamus (unemployed, no relatives), 35, likes a Polish waitress. As a first date he drives her in his van to the coast and they sleep together. Soon she moves in. Bliss. When she mumbles in her sleep he gets an app to translate it - "I'll die if you ever leave me". His self-doubt sours the love. She leaves the cottage then later the country. He flies to Poland to find her. He tracks her down in a cybercafe in her home-town. Didn't grab me.
• Dear season - She want to lose her virginity before she's 18. One week to go. She identifies a man, a quiet loner, about 30. She has sex with him twice before returning to boarding school. Her father is furious when he finds out. The loner leaves town. When she returns she visits the loner's bungalow and stays for hours. A young deer comes and goes. "She reached out for him in the dark. When she at last rose to go she was stiff from the cold and felt many years older." No.
• Ox mountain death song - Sergeant Brown, retiring in 3 weeks, wants to arrest Canavan (womanizer, petty thief) for something. He discovers that Canavan has terminal cancer, which makes him more dangerous. Brown tracks Canavan down using instinct, pushes him off a cliff. I don't get the final paragraph.
• Old stock - The narrator needs a break. He hears that his great uncle Arno, 80+, is about to die in Donagal. On his deathbed Arno says that his cottage is an aphrodisiac to women. The narrator inherits it, falls in love with the surrounding countryside, wears Arno's cap - "I began to get the sense that life is not much more than an inch or two deep really - how you display the surface of things can dictate all else". A young female solicitor visits. An hour later they're in bed. A second meeting in town fails. A passing female hiker enters his cottage and seduces him. Suddenly we're told that he is about to deliver his third novel. He decides that "To face myself I would have to leave him go. I would have to move on again". There's a hint at the end that he might be Arno's son.
• Saint Catherine of the fields - The narrator (50+, coming out of a relationship where the woman returned to her wife) collects old Irish songs. He hears about an expert, Jackson, tracking him down to a nursing home. He's senile, 96. He sings a long song (pre 20th century?) that the narrator records. The rest of the story recounts the lyrics - how a woman seduces a lonely herdsman then reveals that her husband knows all about it - she did it for him.
• Toronto and the state of grace - The publican, Alan, has 2 late customers on a quiet day - Tony and his mother. They both work their way along the row of spirits, chatting to each other as they go - witty, sometimes barbed banter. She stands up and dies. Waiting for the ambulance Tony continues drinking. Eventually alone, Alan drinks and takes a walk to the beach.
• Who's-dead McCarthy - Con McCarthy walks up and down O'Connell Street telling people who's died and how. When he died, the narrator took over. My favourite so far.
• Roma kid - A 9 year-old leaves her family and sneaks onto a train. She goes into a wood. An old man finds her and brings her up in his trailer in the wood, teaches her English. When he dies, she takes over.
• Extremadura (until night falls) - a homeless Irish guy (first-person) walks through a Spanish town at sunset, sees a dog, sees a girl, a boy, an old man. The dog talks to him. He still misses a past love. Not a good piece.
• The old country music - Dawn. Hanna (17 years old, 4 months pregnant) and Setanta (32, a tattoo artist, about to rob a petrol station, used to be engaged to Hanna's mother) are engaged. Hanna (her third-person PoV) is waiting in the getaway van. She realises that Setanta has left her. Her mother arrives to comfort her.
• Roethke in the bughouse - The poet Roethke had a breakdown while in Ireland. In this first-person piece Roethke is in a psychiatric hospital being interviews by a doctor. The doctor plays along with Roethke's fanciful analogies, colourfully expressed. Maybe this is my favourite piece.

Other reviews

• Hephzibah Anderson (passion proves hazardous for the loners and oddballs who drift through Barry’s forceful landscape.)
• Justine Jordan (Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns ... This battle between long-term loneliness and the urge for love showcases what Barry does so well, effortlessly shifting narrative gear from the casually omniscient ... to a howl of interior pain)
• Michael Schaub (There's not a bad story in the bunch, and it's as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written. ... Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws)
• John Michaud (A few of the entries here amount to less than fully developed stories. “Who’s-Dead McCarthy” is a character sketch about a Limerick man who is a walking, talking obituary page, a “connoisseur of death.” “Extremadura (Until Night Falls)” is narrated by a ghostly spirit wandering the west of Ireland. These slighter stories sustain the thematic cohesion of the book while offering a change of tone and pace. They are the mortar between the bricks. )
• Naoise Dolan (That Old Country Music asks where artists get ideas, and what they should do with them. The characters live mostly in the west of Ireland, with the odd urban interlude and Extremadura for witches (why not?). Only some are aware they’re trying to make something, but they all must reckon with their surroundings and invest themselves in outcomes they cannot control. It’s a bit like love ... Often Barry gives away the plot up front so we can focus on characters, sunsets, what’s said and what’s not.)

"Dark lies the island" by Kevin Barry (Vintage, 2013)

Stories from New Yorker, etc.

• "Across the rooftops" - can't see much in it
• "Wifey Redux" - Father of cute 17 year old angry about her boyfriend, and even angrier when he ditches her. He confronts the boyfriend. He's had mental problems before
• "Fjord of Killary" - A fourtysomething poet who's not had a collection out for 5 years has bought a West Ireland hotel. He makes notes about the bar clientelle and their language. He's hoped to be known as a convivial host. When there's a flood, the hotel's isolated and he gives out free drinks. He feels he's becoming accepted
• "A Cruelty" - A man on a train is anxious when it doesn't keep to the routine. He's anxious later when his park bench is occupied and when a hobo(?) confronts him
• "Beer Trip to Llandudno" - A Camra branch from Liverpool have a daytrip, discussing their ale grading system and issues regarding the newsletter. They realise how pathetic they are
• "Ernestine and Kit" - 2 60+ women drive around Eire trying to abduct toddlers.
• "The Mainland Campaign" - A young bomber in London has to change plans
• "Wistful England" - Daniel, a 25 y.o. house-sharing with some heavy drinkers, thinks he sees his ex in various places. At a nightclub he talks to her. He asks the bar staff afterwards if it really happened.
• "Doctor Sot" - Sot (Dr Carl O'Connor), happily married, is an alcoholic. 30 years a GP, he asks to do some OutReach with local travellers (he'd seen that one of them was very pretty). While he spends a night in their camp his long-suffering wife "flowed through the house. For fear that he would get back early, she would lay cloths now over all the mirrors in the house"
• "The Girls and the Dogs" - 8 months away from his wife and 8 month old daughter in Cork, the narrator's in hiding in a rotting caravan by a house where 2 sisters (one a gangster's wife) and their kids live. He's locked in the caravan for days, manages to escape. Inconsequential.
• "White Hitachi" - Patrick, 36, frees his van from a pound and picks up his young brother from a juvenile detention unit. They pick up some drugs to distribute. Inconsequential. The dialogue, as usual, is lively though - He put a hand inside his togs and tigged at himself briefly ... 'When you get a bit of heat at all like the heat we're after getting today,' he said, 'the man below do be swimmin' in his own melt.
• "Dark Lies the Island" - She's a cutter. She passed her exams and could go on to study medicine. She takes a year out to stay at the family's posh holiday home, maybe do some art. When she can, she logs into a chatroom of people interested in self-harm. She thinks that she might start cutting again tonight. Then she goes into the garden with the 9 kitchen knives, looks at the sea, and throws the knives far away.
• "Berlin Arkonaplatez - My Lesbian Summer" - His summer with Silvija. My favourite.

Some stories share imagery - kids with shaven heads, etc. Perhaps consecutive stories share imagery?

Other reviews

• Chris Power (In "Fjord of Killary", the highlight of this excellent collection. ... Not every story is so successful. "The Mainland Campaign"... compares unfavourably with a story by ... William Trevor. ... there is action and plot, but Steven's motives remain unexplored. ... "Beer Trip to Llandudno", conversely, has scant plot but carries plenty of meaning.)
• goodreads

"Night boat to tangier" by Kevin Barry

An audio book. Charlie and Maurice are at Algeciras ferry port. They're in their 50s. They banter. They made big money shipping drugs into Ireland from Spain. They had to separate and go into hiding (Spain and rural Ireland). We're first given Maurice's backstory - how he invested his drug money in property, developed a drug habit (heroin and cocaine), had a child, Dilly, tried to distance himself from dangerous Charles, how the property deals went wrong, how Charles slept with his wife, Cynthia, how he nearly committed suicide, taking his 4 y.o. daughter Dilly with him.

They're still at the ferryport. They talk about death.

We flashback to see Maurice and Charles through the eyes of a Dublin barman. Maurice knifes Charles in the knee, cutting ligaments.

Dilly Hearne, 23, arrives at the port. She's on the way to Tangers with a consignment of false passports. She recognises the men, but they don't recognise her. She thinks about approaching them. She'd left Ireland after her mother died. Her mother's last words were "Never come back." She had wandered around Spain, plans to go to Morocco, live in the desert.

Not long after the suicidal thoughts, Maurice spent 5 years wandering Spain, "trying to coax a pattern from his days". He slit his own eye. Back in Ireland his mother visited while he's in a mental hospital. Charles became his room-mate. Charles told Maurice that Dilly might be his daughter. Maurice knew.

We learn that when Cynthia knew her disease was terminal, she walked into the sea.

The end fades. The 2 men agree that Dilly will be ok anyway.The default style is lyricism. I don't like "the days as cold as evil" but I'm happy with "their voices fell into conspiracy above the river's voices" and "they whispered and tunneled together to the bottom of the night and lay there dazed".

Other reviews

• Alan Warner
• Goodreads
• James Lasdun (for a little too long it trades on archetypal gangster-character tropes — dangerous volatility, sentimental tenderness — without constructing situations that justify their display ... Back story is where novels often sag, but in this case it’s where the book hits its propulsive stride)

"Beatlebone" by Kevin Barry (Canongate, 2015)

It's 1978. John is being driven through Ireland. He asks to be let out - "It's four in the morning - the motor idles at a low hum - and the trees have voices, and they are very old" (p.7). "He's been coming loose of himself since early in the spring ... And he has been haunted by his own self for such a long while" (p.10).

He wanders, recalls his childhood and looking after his baby. Years before, he bought a nearby 19-acre island. He reads on a tourist display board that there are 365 islands. "So how will he tell which island is his?" (p.13). He finds a place to sleep. "He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn't want to sound too French about it." (p.22). He's signed in as Mr McCarthy. He knows the media will catch up with him. "All I want is to get to my island" (p.31), he says.

He's interested in words, and has a quick sense of humour. He calls a minder and they get drunk. He pretends to be Ken, with a stutter. Fragments of conversation come and go. There are stream-of-consciousness sections - "He circles and twists like an aggravated goose. Energy is the difficulty always. Too much of. An excess of. Flick out these fingers and they might shoot beads of fire. One neurotic foot in front of the other, and circling - what you do is you keep moving" (p.44).

He hides in the Amethyst Hotel (more a squat than a hotel) with a young couple and Joe Director, who fancies himself as a therapist. "Part four" is written almost like a play script. It begins by setting the scene -

Pale night. An upstairs room at the Amethyst Hotel. Once a room for dancing, its ghosts, unseen, move in silence across the old boards still. Sea-rasp outside hoarse as love by night whispered. The room is bare but there are symbols of the occult daubed on the walls.

The 4 of them have a Ranting therapy session. John walks out, his thick skin unpunctured despite his weak points being probed - the others know he's John Lennon. He spends a day in a cave by the sea, has a conversation with a seal.

Part Six begin at 11.11.11 on 11.11.11 by the entrance to the Dakota Building. "If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be, I needed to get to the island" (p.176). It's the putative author, writing about his research. There's a photo of the hotel. The author even spent a night in the cave. There are a few psychological/biographical similarities between the author and John Lennon.

Then it's back to the story. His minder finds supplies and a leaky boat, and they head for the island

Home bites at him for a bit. But he will not go back there. The days of England are done for now. What the fuck is England good for? Sausages and beer and pale gawpy faces. He sits in the boat and he fucking well bails. On white porcelain cups in railway cafés the lipstick traces. The boat moves on its slow-boom beat and it dips and scoops and cuts through the water. His gut is all over the shop. His heart aches for old England. The dark sky growls; in the near low mountains there are rumbles. (p.211)

The next chapter's set in a London recording studio. It ends with a fragmented monologue about Liverpool, about the island, about avoiding a big egg that could be a symbol of his rebirth. In the final chapter he's making his way back to civilisation. He remembers first love.

There's a empty line between paragraphs, and many one-line paragraphs. The fluid style (mixing real/unreal, inner/outside seamlessly) and in-character dialogue reminds me of Nicola Barker's. I liked it.

Other reviews

• Edward Docx (The Guardian) ( sentence by sentence, the writing is original, exact and telling. When Lennon is forced to lie low at the Amethyst Hotel on nearby Achill Island, the hog-like man running a “ranting” cult there has “tiny yellowish piss-hole-in-the-snow-type eyes” while his young acolyte has “milk-bottle shoulders”. There are a dozen great passages that lyrically solder the profound to the profane in the way of the great Irish playwrights. And lines emerge every few pages that make you want to read them again ... But for all this, on the macro level, the novel didn’t quite work for me. The problem manifests itself in the uneasy fissure between Barry’s command of language and his Lennon’s less comfortable relationship to words)
• Steve Earle (New York Times) (Only a literary beast, a daredevil wholly convinced he was put on this planet to write, would ever or should ever attempt to cast a person as iconic as John Lennon as a character in a tale of his own invention... Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven’t yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox — ­razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation. )
• Luke Brown (Financial Times) (Barry is an excellent writer of dialogue, skilled at establishing characters quickly, and accordingly he writes some of the best pub scenes in the language, hilarious cacophonies of egos clamouring for attention. He describes drunkenness exactly in disconnected bursts of clarity. ... Lennon, we realise, offers Barry a way to approach his own biography and the “sentimental forces” he has “always been repelled by and drawn to”. )
• Eoin McNamee (Irish Times) (What is Lennon after? Its hard to tell, tied up in who he is. There is the frail figure unable to bear the weight of his own mythology. There’s the hard-headed survivor. The seeker, the rebel, the self-infantilising, guru-seeking peacenik. He composes music by tapping the subconscious and seeing if he can put manners on what comes out. He addresses his id in the same way ... The complexity and beauty of the language are counterpointed and boundaried by the honed-down structure.)
• Jean Zimmerman (Barry absolutely nails the period ... Hallucinatory and beautiful, the language Barry employs to reveal Lennon's inner torment make Beatlebone much more than just a work of fan fiction.)
• Francesca Wade (The Telegraph) (As Barry follows John’s strange journey, the boundaries between fact and fiction, author and subject, past and present morph. Dark, trippy and comic, Beatlebone is a heady exploration of creativity and identity.)