Kevin Barry’s novel is both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos.
As darkness falls one evening in October 1891 in Butte, Mont., Tom Rourke, an Irishman “twenty-nine years to heaven,” heads out to see what the night has to offer. Well-dressed but frayed at the edges — “in suave array and manic tatters” — Tom sips beer and slaps shots in the Pay Day, the Cesspool and the Graveyard. Drink and dope help him forget his many debts. He rubs shoulders with — or rubs the wrong way — Danny the Dog-Boy, Jeremiah The Chin Murphy and Shovel Burgess.
“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 ofThere is his rogues’ gallery of characters, many of them grotesque and larger than life.
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.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic.We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
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