38 The New York Review
in an out-of-the-way tavern. “You know
that mostly all we’d do is sit and talk to
each other,” Charlie says, to which Mau-
rice replies, “It’s the mostly is the knife
in my heart, Charlie.” Something simi-
lar occurs when Maurice comes home
to find Charlie and Cynthia asleep in
bed. “Is this going on again, he said, but
quietly, and they did not wake.” It’s the
“again” that comes as a surprise to the
reader—and tells us all we need to know
about an affair that we, like Maurice,
hadn’t realized was ongoing.
Often in Barry’s work a love triangle
fuels the drama. His characters are
wildly romantic, their love lives operati-
cally intense—“I fully accept there’s a
thing called love, Maurice says. Haven’t
I been half my born days up to my
sucker eyeballs in it?” Their affairs are
frequently accelerated by the chemical
interaction between narcotics and pas-
sion: “The first six months on heroin
with Cynthia were the most beautiful
days of all time. Love and opiates—this
is unimprovable in the human sphere.
Like young gods they walked out.”
The men at the center of these fictions
both do and don’t know that the women
they adore are smarter, tougher, and
certainly more clear-sighted than they
are. City of Bohane features one of the
great crime matriarchs in literature, an
octogenarian named Girly who lies in
bed with the curtains drawn, drink-
ing and taking pills, watching films
of vintage musicals, longing for the
glory days of Tab Hunter and Natalie
Wood—and waiting for her moment to
seize control of the blighted city. Mau-
rice and Charlie defer to Cynthia, who
masterminds Maurice’s business even
as she foresees the disaster that awaits
them: “She had a way of talking that
made him realise he would not find a
way out. She let him know there was no
way to escape from himself. She could
see what was coming.”
Two Irish guys waiting and waiting,
more or le s s i n t he m idd le of nowhere —
of course one thinks of Beckett and his
ability to pack hilarity, despair, resig-
nation, and hope into a single sentence,
as well as his delighted familiarity with
the body’s unruly rebellions. Charlie’s
laments about the damage that an oc-
topus meal has done to his digestion
would have made Beckett proud, and
the novel’s opening lines—“Would
you say there’s any end in sight, Char-
lie? I’d say you nearly have an answer
to that question already, Maurice”—
could have been spoken by Waiting for
Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon.
But in other ways Barry’s project is
the opposite of Beckett’s efforts to see
how much could be left out: motivation,
geography, description. We know so lit-
tle about Molloy’s appearance that he
could be a brain speaking to us from a
jar. Barry’s impulse, by contrast, is to put
everything in: history, time, place, physi-
cal detail. Early in City of Bohane, a
gangster is described as having a “mouth
of teeth on him like a vandalised grave-
yard but we all have our crosses.” After
a few pages, we feel we could pick Mau-
rice and Charlie out of a lineup:
Maurice Hearne’s jaunty, crooked
smile will appear with frequency.
His left eye is smeared and dead,
the other oddly bewitched, as
though with an excess of life, for
balance. He wears a shabby suit,
an open-necked black shirt, white
runners and a derby hat perched
high on the back of his head. Dude-ish, at one time, certainly, but past
it now....Charlie Redmond? The face
somehow has an antique look,
like a court player’s, medieval, a
man who’d strum his lute for you.
In some meadowsweet lair. Hot,
adulterous eyes and again a shabby
suit, but dapper shoes in a rusted-
orange tone, a pair of suede-finish
creepers that whisper of brothels,
also a handsome green corduroy
neck-tie. Also, stomach trouble,
bags like graves beneath his eyes,
and soul trouble.One of the dark jokes running through
Beckett’s work is how little his charac-
ters remember; Maurice and Charlie’s
problem is that they can’t forget. Their
memories surface not in chronological
order, as in a biography, but prompted by
a remark, a sight, or an event, as they do
in life. Barry trusts the reader to order
and arrange these scattered glimpses
of the past, to reconstruct the stages of
Maurice and Charlie’s career, and to be
moved by their tentative probings of the
deepest scars, most of them inflicted by
the collapse of Maurice and Cynthia’s
marriage and the defection of Dilly.
The novel takes its epigraph from
Lorca: “In Spain, the dead are more
alive than the dead of any other coun-
try in the world.” Death—and the
dead—are never far from Maurice and
Charlie’s thoughts. Maurice mourns
his father’s fatal decline into madness,
a downturn signaled by an obsessive
fondness for the songs of Hank Wil-
liams. Cynthia’s death is the wound
from which Maurice will never recover:And now from the vantage of his
years a terrible swoon comes down
on him; Cynthia, for a moment,
descends all the way through him.
This is not a rare occurrence. He
will never lose the feeling of love
that they had together, or the nau-
sea of its absence.Hate is not the answer to love;
death is its answer.The two aging gangsters contemplate
their own mortality, calculating how
many dogs they will live long enough to
own: “I’d get a dog again, Charlie says,
but I don’t know if I have the length of
a small dog left in me. You definitely
don’t have two dogs in you, Maurice
says.” And they speculate about the
afterlife:I’m not seeing a meadow full of
flowers.... Not seeing a moonful
bay neither. With all your old birds
there, and they lined up, waiting
on you, one after the other, in the
peach of their youths. Their rosy
cheeks and their glad little eyes.
I’m not seeing that by any means.
But what I am imagining, Maurice,
is a kind of... quiet. You know?
Just a kind of... silence.Lovely, Maurice Hearne says.
Restful.When you think what we put up
with in our lives? Noise-wise?It’s a cacophony, Mr. Redmond.Even when they commiserate about
Dilly’s difficult adolescence, their com-plaints summon up images of death and
near death:From when she was about thirteen
or fourteen? Maurice says. It was
all going a bit amateur dramatics
with Dilly. Scarification. Voices
in the night. Running away to the
Ummera Wood and burying her-
self alive. Not calling her mother
nor me. Not so much as a text mes-
sage. We’re going up the walls. Her
ladyship is buried to the shoulders
in the fucken dirt.And all of it only increases their long-
ing for the blissful years of Dilly’s
childhood: “A gorgeous little one.
Watch a bit of telly with you. Laughingher head off. The little chuckles? I can
hear them in my chest still.”All three of Barry’s novels are for-
mally daring and inventive. The narra-
tives take sudden turns that can throw
the reader off balance. For the first two
hundred pages of Beatlebone, we’re
privy to the dreams and despairs of
John Lennon as he searches for the is-
land on which he can really let go and
scream, practicing what he’s learned in
Primal Scream Therapy, “a technique
for getting at buried pain and child-
hood trauma.” We follow his odyssey
through an abandoned hotel, in and
out of the clutches of an abusive cult,
on boats and beaches and into a cave
where he experiences an epiphany
laced with existential terror. Then
there’s a chapter break, and we’re in
Manhattan, outside the Dakota, with
a writer who seems to be Kevin Barry,
and who is trying to figure out how to
write a novel about Lennon. His re-
search leads him to recreate the trav-
els of his hero, a journey that involves
some harrowing moments in the cave,
a troubling vision on the shore, and a
succession of meditations on ghosts,
sentimentality, and the occult that
provide some of the book’s most pro-
found and riveting moments. Then ev-
erything changes again, and we’re in a
London studio in which Lennon and
a long-suffering recording engineer are
trying to produce a fictive album that,
we come to realize, will sound more
like a sustained, maddened incantation
than a series of songs.
The dislocations in Night Boat to
Ta ngier aren’t nearly so radical, but it’s
startling when the narrative slips seam-
lessly into Dilly’s point of view and,
more briefly, into Cynthia’s. Dilly hasMaurice and Charlie’s talent for crime,
but it’s tempered by her mother’s savvy
intelligence. If Maurice and Charlie
are out of step with the times, Dilly is
wholly in tune with the moment. Un-
like them, she speaks Spanish, and she’s
well aware that the money is no longer
in drug trafficking but in smuggling
human beings. En route to Ta ng ier,
she has thirty-two fake Spanish pass-
ports sewn into the lining of her suit-
case.
Maurice and Charlie are no match
for her, and yet she fears that they’re
capable of dragging her down in their
heavy undertow. Like the two men,
she’s attuned to the power of language.
But even as we remember Cynthia’s
sage warning—“the fear of turning
into our parents... is what turns us
into our fucking parents”—we feel, or
hope, that Dilly’s wariness of the florid
discourse so natural to Maurice and
Charlie may save her from winding up
like them:Something else that she had
learned—you need to watch your-
self at every minute of the day. If
you don’t watch yourself, the bad-
ness might slide in, or the evil.
Watch your words most of all.
Watch for the glamorous sentence
that appears from nowhere—it
might have plans for you. Watch
out for the clauses that are el-
egantly strung, for the string of
words bejewelled. Watch out for
ripe language—it means your
words may be about to go off.In one of Barry’s strongest short sto-
ries, “Fjord of Killary,” yet another of
his romantics, a blocked poet, buys a
decrepit hotel complete with a tavern
frequented by locals who hate him. The
inn is nearly washed away in a flood,
but at the last moment the waters re-
cede. It seems like a metaphor for the
arc of so much of Barry’s fiction: he’s
unwilling to let his characters drown,
but he doesn’t feel compelled to save
them from the trouble in which they’ve
mired themselves.
At the end of Night Boat to Tangier,
Maurice and Charlie leave the terminal
and venture out into rainy Algeciras:Maurice Hearne steps out from
the held tension of himself, he
loosens up, he sticks his head out
beneath the jut and gazes blankly
to the night sky, there above the
port and stacks, and yes, it is clear-
ing, and the stars are the same old
stars, and he turns a look to his pal
that’s halfways hopeful—“I think it’s stopping,” he says.We want the rain to stop falling on
Maurice and Charlie. We want them to
survive with some modicum of hope.
And it’s strange, really, because they
are, as they themselves admit, “truly
dreadful fucken men.” We’ve seen them
inflict casual violence on the hapless
Ben; we’ve heard about the beatings
and knifings and murders they’ve com-
mitted. Cynthia recalls watching Mau-
rice “thump the head off some young
fella on Washington Street,” an attack
provoked because someone might have
said something about his shoes. So why
are we so charmed by these dreadful
men, and why are we glad to spend so
many pages in their company?Samuel Beckett