posted on 12 Feb 2025

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

Every now and then a book comes along that stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder whether the author could possibly pull off something as audacious again. That’s certainly how I felt when I sat down and read Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier (reviewed here) back in 2019. I concluded my review back then with this:

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.

Well, I’ve done exactly what I said and I’ve been catching up on Barry’s other novels and rushed out to get this new offering, The Heart in Winter, when it was published. And, if I had any doubt that Barry’s daring and often thrilling voice could be sustained, this puts those thoughts well and truly to bed. Here again are the explosive sentences, unconventional uses of internal and external dialogue and an extraordinary relish for the language that was so apparent in Night Boat.

This time the setting is Butte, Montana at the end of the 19th century – it’s the pioneering Wild West and a magnet for Irish immigrants looking to make whatever fortune they can. Boyishly handsome, Tom Rourke is, at heart, a poet and romantic but he’s also a cheat, a drug dealer and user and puckishly unscrupulous. His life is going nowhere and you immediately get the feeling that, unless something happens for him, he’s bound to cross someone some day and that will be curtains.

In this community of barely literate men, Rourke makes himself some money and social capital by writing florid letters to the homeland on behalf of those seeking to tempt a wife out to join them. The local mine captain, Long Anthony Harrington doesn’t need Rourke’s letter writing services but he does want a wife and when one turns up Tom Rourke’s life suddenly changes forever. Horrified by Harrington’s hyper-religious fanaticism, Polly Gillespie discovers she has much more in common with Tom than her newly found husband.

When the two decide it’s time to covertly cut out of Butte and make off together, the book takes on a tinge of Cormac McCarthy – albeit McCarthy in uncharacteristically lighter hearted mood. As the two lovers meander hopelessly lost trying to find their way to the next town, Harrington hires a band of hitmen to chase them down.

This is not going to end well…..

But I don’t want to offer up any more of the plot which veers between the hallucinogenic and the extremely violent because you’ll want to read that without any more spoilers from me. What you get is a compelling story full of astonishing plot developments, brilliant character building and language that surprises and thrills – Barry has a way of making words feel new.

I think this will certainly be one of my books of year even though it technically came out towards the end of 2024. I’m sure the paperback can’t be far away but why not invest in the hardback – because you’ll want to keep it to read more than once.

 

Terry Potter

February 2025