36 The New York Review
‘Their Chaotic Mouths’
Francine Prose
Night Boat to Tangier
by Kevin Barry.
Doubleday, 255 pp., $25.95
In an afterword to the paperback edi-
tion of his first novel, City of Bohane
(2011), Kevin Barry writes, “I work
primarily from the ear.... If you can
get the speech, I believe, you can get
the soul.” He’s talking about a book in
which he not only got the speech but in-
vented a whole new language, the argot
of the imagined metropolis of Bohane:
a densely populated, catastrophically
polluted, anarchic corner of the near
future. Part Irish-inflected English,
part rap lyric, part Clockwork Orange,
part Hibernian bard, it’s how the street
punks, mob bosses, alpha women, and
warring gangs communicate in this
dystopian western Ireland hellhole, in
districts named Smoketown, the Back
Trace, and Big Nothin’, “a place of
thorn and stone and sudden devouring
swampholes.”
Barry’s new novel, Night Boat to
Ta ngier, seems equally capacious,
though it’s set in a much smaller space:
the sinister ferry terminal in the Span-
ish port of Algeciras and the unsettling
orbit of two dazzlingly verbal, volatile,
heartbroken Irish thugs, Charlie Red-
mond and Maurice Hearne: “They are
in their low fifties. The years are rolling
out like tide now. There is old weather
on their faces, on the hard lines of
their jaws, on their chaotic mouths.
But they retain—just about—a rakish
air.” Veteran hashish smugglers ren-
dered redundant by hydroponics and
homegrown weed, Maurice and Char-
lie haunt the terminal because they be-
lieve that Maurice’s beloved daughter,
Dilly—whom he hasn’t seen for three
years—may be departing or arriving
on a ferry to, or from, North Africa.
As in his second novel, Beatlebone
(2015), and two story collections,
There Are Little Kingdoms (2007) and
Dark Lies the Island (2012), it’s Barry’s
voice that propels us through the work,
through paragraphs punctuated by
turns of phrase that deliver little jolts of
pleasure. Like their author, his charac-
ters are aware of the implications and
ironies of language. In the story “Wist-
ful England,” a young man reflects
on the signage in his neighborhood:
“‘Humps for Half a Mile’ a road sign
read, warning of the traffic- calming
measures that were in place, but the
words had a metaphorical resonance.
The house that he lived in was not a
house in which he might casually talk
of metaphors.” The hero of “To the
Hills” despises the words relationship
and partner: “Partner, I don’t know,
it makes it sound like a badminton
team.”
In Beatlebone, John Lennon—in
search of an island off the west coast of
Ireland (which the real-life John Len-
non bought in 1967)—finds a wardrobe
full of suits that belonged to his driver’s
dead father: “He takes one out. It is
very old and heavy. A word appears in
his mouth—worsted. An old-fashioned
word—two slow farmer syllables. Wor-
sted. West Country farmer. Pebbles
in the mouth. Woor- sted.” A nd Mau-
rice recalls how a troubling unease
with words preceded a descent into
madness:
He’d make words on his lips and
not know where they came from.
He started to see the sky as a kind
of membrane. His head felt like it
was the size of a planet. The sky
was just a casing for his pulsing
brain and it was too thin. He might
explode like a star.Maurice and Charlie aren’t just ca-
reer criminals; they’re comedians,
philosophers, poets, and social critics.
Their conversation has rhythm and
snap; it’s funny, lyrical, obscene, meta-
physical, unflaggingly alive. The nov-
el’s omniscient narrative voice sounds
so much like its heroes that we feel as
if we’re seeing the terminal through
their eyes: “A blind man roils in night
sweat and clicks his teeth to sell lottery
tickets like a fat, rattling serpent—he’s
doing nothing for the place.”
Much of the novel is in dialogue,
interrupted by passages of descrip-
tion and memories of lost youth, lost
love, and the drug trade in which
Maurice and Charlie earned and squan-
dered fortunes: “I’m not saying we
were down a coalmine, Maurice... I’m
not saying we were digging the roads.
But there was a lot of work and a lot of
travelling and there was a great deal of
danger and annoyance.” The two for-
mer partners and romantic rivals are
great talkers, on subjects ranging from
witchcraft to masturbation, communi-
cating with dogs, food, home design,
numerology, violence, elves, soccer,
how Bob Marley might have forestalled
his final illness. They want to know theSpanish word for “crusty,” their term
for the young people who migrate be-
tween Spain and Morocco with their
dreadlocks and rucksacks, a tribe to
which they think Dilly might belong.
“It’s perroflauta,” a Spanish woman
tells them, “it means a-dog-and-a-
flute”—a derogatory reference to the
instruments and animals the “crusta-
ceans” bring with them.
Maurice and Charlie consider how
they’d fare in an Algeciras jail. They
discuss whether a line of poetry comes
from Shakespeare or Stevie Wonder
and why their business did so well at
home:Because if Irish people are mar-
tyrs for the drink, they’re worse
again for the dope, once they get
the taste for it, because it eases the
anxiety and we’re a very anxious
people.Why wouldn’t we be, Moss? I mean
Jesus Christ in the garden, after
all that we been through. Drag-
ging ourselves around that wet
tormented rock on the edge of the
black Atlantic for the months and
years never-ending and the long
gawpy faces screamin’ for the light
and the jaws operatin’ on wires and
the pale little yellow arses hanging
out the back end of us?Barry’s control of tone is so assured
that he can turn a fragment of autobi-
ography, confession, and apology into
a terrifying threat as Maurice bullies
a “crusty” youth who he hopes mighthave seen Dilly somewhere in Spain
and might know where she is:First off, Ben? I’m sorry I bit your
shoulder. There was no call for
it. It’s shocking behaviour. But I
was badly brought up, you know?
I didn’t have your advantages. I’d
say your old man was an accoun-
tant or something, was he? Or
did he run a leisure center.... But
me? I came off a terrace street the
sun never shone on. I was put out
working at four years of age. In
Cork city. I was a bus conductor,
actually, on the number eight, St.
Luke’s Cross direction. But that’s
all a long time ago now, and those
were the sweet days of my youth
and they’re not coming back. Oh,
no, they are not. And never did
I think I’d wind up the way I am
now. A man that’s heartbroken. A
man that hasn’t seen his Dilly in
three fucken years. Imagine what
that does to a fella? But I apolo-
gise again, Benny. I do. Are we on
speaking terms?Benny half nods; he’s very scared.There’s not much action in the ter-
minal, and the men do their best to cut
the boredom, terrorizing poor Ben,
harassing the clerk at the information
window, and making their aggressive
presence felt: “Charlie’s smile is, of its
own right, an enlivened thing. It travels
the terminal as though disembodied
from him. It leaves a woven lace of hys-
terical menace in its wake.”
No matter how funny and smart,
abrasive and irreverent the dialogue is,
we’re never allowed to forget that “their
talk is a shield against feeling,” and
that Charlie and Maurice require es-
pecially thick armor against their emo-
tions. Early on, Barry enumerates “the
seven distractions—love, grief, pain,
sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-
death.” The men have blown through
all seven and emerged with a load of
regret. Maurice is missing an eye and
Charlie is lame in one leg. They’ve
seen so much bloodshed and fear and
sampled so much of their product
that they’ve both done time in a men-
tal hospital. They’ve failed Maurice’s
wife, Cynthia, and Dilly, the woman
and the child they both loved. In fact,
they’ve failed at everything, even deal-
ing drugs: “The money no longer is in
dope. The money now is in people. The
Mediterranean is a sea of slaves.” If
City of Bohane uses the horrors of an
imagined future to reflect on the pres-
ent moment, Night Boat to Tangier is
about the present and the past, about
memory and loss, which is partly why
it’s a sadder and more beautiful book.The novel is divided into brief sections,
sometimes just a sentence long, sepa-
rated by space breaks. The unconven-
tiona l pa rag raph i ng compels us to focus ;
there’s no room for the mind to wander
in the midst of a long passage of prose.
That close attention is essential, since
Barry often reminds us of how much
can turn on a single word. Charlie, who
had an affair with Cynthia, explains that
they conducted much of their romanceKevin Barry