posted on 16 Sep 2019

Night Boat To Tangier by Kevin Barry

The setting for Kevin Barry’s extraordinary new novel – tough, lyrical, referential and intense – is the Spanish ferry port of Algeciras:

“Algeciras is principally a transport hub and industrial city. Its main activities are connected with the port, which serves as the main embarkation point between Spain and Tangier and other ports in Morocco as well as the Canary Islands and the Spanish enclaves of Ceutaand Melilla. It is ranked as the 16th busiest port in the world. “ (Wikipedia)

Sitting in the terminal are two fifty-something Irishmen from Cork, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, who have clearly seen better days – one has a lame leg and the other a blind eye – but who still retain some of their past raffish charm and air of brooding brutality. They sit and exchange observations and reminiscences as they wait, watching for arrivals and departures.

After only a few pages the reader will immediately hear the echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Ham and Clov or even Ray and Ken from Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. What is perhaps even more important will be the inescapable feeling that we are in Purgatory or that we’re waiting on the near side shore of the Styx and Maurice and Charlie are taking account of their lives.

And what lives they have been; major league drug dealers, drug users themselves, hard-drinkers and, as their profession demands, violent and unemotionally brutal. Unspeakable acts have been done in their name and uncountable amounts of money have been won and lost by the pair. And, we learn as time ticks by almost audibly in the terminal, they are waiting for Maurice’s estranged twenty-something daughter Dilly to pass through. She is, they believe, part of the drifting band of ‘crusties’ who shuttle between Europe and North Africa. They are stoically dogged in their task as anyone who they believe might have information about her finds out if they are unfortunate enough to swim within their sphere of influence.

The sense of time suspended that Barry creates in this novel is tangible and will be familiar to anyone who has had to kill time waiting for unreliable transport or for someone to arrive who may or may not show up. The ebb and flow of people, the smells of an industrial port and the utter indifference of other people is brilliantly evoked and utterly appropriately oppressive. All this forms the backdrop to the otherwise often comic dialogue that the two men share – a sort of black comedy double act performing as they slip down into the darkness of their own private hell.

What emerges in the second half of the book is an unexpectedly sensitive unfolding of the back story to this moment. We learn just how intertwined the two men’s lives have been, how they found their way into the drug smuggling world and how they evolved into the men they are. Along that path we get more focus on Maurice’s stormy, drug-addled but oddly tender-at-times relationship with Cynthia, Dilly’s mother and her eventual painful death (presumably from cancer).

Barry moves around in time in an unhindered way but thankfully always signals these chronological moves at the start of chapters so we don’t get too confused. This is a technique that works surprisingly well and I was always grateful for the point of reference as the journey into the minds of our two anti-heroes often separates and fragments.

At the bottom line this feels like a morality tale warning us of the bleak landscape of damage a life of crime wreaks on the soul. Alan Warner reviewing the book for The Guardian put it this way:

“The novel puts a great deal of procedural crime fiction into perspective as puerile and exploitative fluff. For here is a meticulous, devastatingly vivid portrayal of serious crime and its real consequences: the waste, the insane risks, the threat of demonic violence, the punishing paranoia and the vulgar glut of cash reward packed into dodgy real estate or money laundering ventures. Most of all, though, the toll is taken on the human soul itself.”

Night Boat To Tangier was long-listed for this year’s Booker and it’s easy to see why. I’ve never read anything by Kevin Barry before but I certainly intend to seek out other things he’s done and keep an eye open for what’s to come. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s going to be a significant name on the Irish literary scene of the future.

 

Terry Potter

September 2019