The Brooklyn Rail

There’s a special pleasure in picking up a new Kevin Barry book. I know I’m likely in for a wild ride of a story and sentences that force the English language into strange and musical shapes. To me, Barry’s prose is best when he reads it aloud—showing all the strange music of Irish English. I was first introduced to his work when he visited my Irish Studies class and read to us. I’ve been hooked ever since. In a recent conversation he told the second Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry (no relation) that he sees writing as “a kind of disappointed musical form” and that the Irish “twist and blend and … beautifully mangle the English.” And it’s this beautifully mangled English that lends such weight and difference to Barry’s sentences. But it’s not just the language that makes Barry’s work so good—he’s mastered the rhythm of regional dialogue and also always does the hard work of world-building whether he’s setting the story in a fictional city (Bohane) or historical town (Butte).

His new novel The Heart in Winter takes us to Butte, Montana in the 1890s when copper was king and Irish miners in abundance. In this roaring mining town lives young Tom Rourke, poet, opium addict, and photographer’s assistant. He sees himself as a master of verse “at a distance of artistic remove” and writes letters for bachelor miners wooing hoped-for brides. When Polly Gillespie arrives in town to marry mine captain Long Anthony Harrington, Rourke falls hard. Gillespie is no blushing virgin, and we hear her frustration in a life that limits her to the likes of the sexually inept and self-flagellating Harrington: “The word chattel came through her mind and ran. It was like another sour turn from the Bible times.” So it’s no surprise that when Tom and Polly meet at the photo studio, there’s a major spark: “they surely understood each other and the whole thing was just the kind of luck that don’t even come once in a lifetime for most.” While some may identify the lovers’ tale as influenced by the great Irish tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows, Barry is smart enough to give Polly agency—she’s not just a subject of desire, quest, and murder: she’s a vibrant, crass, and full-blooded person. And that’s a rarity particularly in Westerns (and epics).

The two lovers decide to run, Rourke absconding with his landlady’s money and burning down her rooming house while also stealing a Palomino. The two ride off into the wild lands of Montana and Idaho, making their way to a showdown in Pocatello where they hope to catch a train for San Francisco. In their travels they meet strange characters—French Canadians who share magic mushrooms and a mad drunken clergyman who shares his tequila and marries them at their request. As the two flee through the dark and wild lands, their food and time running out, the tension builds, and when they pause far too long in a fully stocked hunting cabin, we can’t help but urge them to keep moving. But this is no standard page-turner—there are moments of transcendence that only happen out in the wild (or on mushrooms) where “night in the Territory went past vaguely at the edges like a faint mournful music.… At length the white limbs of the birchwood appeared in the dark to say that the night dissolved.” Polly’s voice provides a recurring image that shows both the impossibility and the inevitability of their love: “And there she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon.”

Their forest idyll is broken when the leader of a trio of Cornish bounty hunters bursts into the cabin. But as soon as he enters roaring into the cabin, he drops dead of a massive stroke, the stench of his death finally forcing the two lovers to venture on. Taking the dead man’s coat as extra cover, they struggle through the winter to Pocatello where they stable the horse and check into a hotel (and a hot bath!) and we think they just might make it. But of course, this isn’t one of those love stories. The violence of their capture is shocking but we stay with Polly as she holds out hope for Tom’s survival: “and the moon showed itself for half a minute and there was fires on the moon and she knew that he was breathing.” Tom is left for dead and Polly kidnapped by the worst of the two Cornishmen who decides to keep Polly for himself. As the novel moves toward its end, we have Polly’s voice to guide us as she tells us:

the sky above her was the province of some ice god with an evil streak to him and malice in his ways and in the bone and iron greyworld of the Idaho Territory that winter she chewed on some hard new thoughts about fate and destiny and love and death and all of that horseshit.

It’s a rollicking, shocking, bloody, gorgeous tale with a heroine who gets the last word. And a refrain that’ll stay with anyone with an ounce of romance and rebellion in their heart: “What if we ride out tonight? What if we ride out and never once look back?”