Kevin Barry’s new novel, “The Heart in Winter,” gets underway with an exhilarating account of a long and riotous night’s journey into day. The Irish author could have carried on in this vein, tracking his protagonist as he continues to crash and burn. Instead, he throws Tom a lifeline in the form of love from a good woman. But that love is forbidden and so comes at a high price. What starts as a gritty depiction of one man going nowhere soon becomes a gripping tale of two lovers on the run.
Tom’s life-altering encounter is with Polly Gillespie, who has just arrived from Chicago to become the wife of God-fearing copper mine captain Anthony Harrington. When Tom, a photographer’s assistant, takes the marriage portrait of the newlyweds, he catches her eye and she captures his heart. An illicit affair develops, but the pair realize the only way to live and love freely is to elope. After resorting to desperate measures by burning down a boardinghouse and stealing money and a palomino horse, Tom and Polly set out for San Francisco. But Harrington doesn’t take kindly to his wife absconding, and it isn’t long before a trio of Cornish guns for hire are hot on the heels of the outlaw couple. Can they stay one step ahead of their pursuers and embark on a new life in their promised land?
Barry is a writer who refuses to be pigeonholed, one whose novels feature fresh displays of stylistic dexterity and explore different fictional terrain. His blistering 2011 debut, “City of Bohane,” presented a dystopian world of grimy gang warfare. “Beatlebone” (2015) centered on John Lennon getting far from the madding crowd and decompressing on the island he bought (“in the middle of a dream”) off the coast of Ireland. And “Night Boat to Tangier” (2019) revolved around two past-their-prime gangsters, “heavy in the bones,” in search of a missing daughter and possible redemption at a Spanish ferry terminal.
“The Heart in Winter” sees Barry once again attempting something new — and pulling it off with aplomb. His first novel to be set in America is both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos. It wears its influences well — the raw flintiness of Cormac McCarthy, the dizzying exuberance of Flann O’Brien, the taut storytelling of Charles Portis — but Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive.
There is his rogues’ gallery of characters, many of them grotesque and larger than life. Tom and Polly meet all types during their adventures, from a “fiddle-scraping duo of Utah-bound mixbloods” to Ding Dong, a former bellhop who lives in the woods, reads messages in the sky and has become “silly” from sleep deprivation. They also encounter a man they call the Reverend, who informs them he has recently killed and buried a fellow Christian besieged by “Luciferian Entities.” He then marries these “Hoodlums of Love,” and they celebrate through the night with his vast quantities of gut-scouring, and later skull-crushing, Tres Sombreros tequila. But along with friends there are foes, not least the “unloveable and unkillable” Jago Marrak, a nearly 7-foot-tall gunman with a “warscape” face and a ruthless desire to track down the two runaways.
Barry’s other main trademark trope is his lyrical prose. We revel in his use of vivid language, whether his characters’ terse, hard-bitten vernacular or his original imagery: Tom’s room is “a few weak strides of a doper long and the breadth of an uneasy dream”; his horse kicks the frozen ground and releases “a petulance of tiny stars”; snow falls on the town “like a dirty white mood.” Even adverbs are deployed to creative effect: Tom salts his eggs “unambiguously” and they go down “controversially”; his nose bleeds “theatrically” and the Reverend sleeps “ravenously.”
Some of Barry’s scenes are mere snapshot sketches that are too short and impressionistic for their own good. Equally disappointing is the novel’s somewhat abrupt ending. However, these flaws are easily outweighed by the book’s many strengths, in particular its well-drawn fugitives. They run and we keep up, emotionally invested in their shared exploits and their individual fates.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic.
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