Book review: The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry - 'the laughter is mocking, sly, but never vicious'

A quarter of a century in the making, Kevin Barry’s first Western novel is proof of the author’s genius, writes Stuart Kelly

Whenever we talk about genre it tends to be understood as various quite distinct categories, even if the concept is invoked in order to add that this is the “literary” version or that a work “transcends” being genre. Usually, genre indicates crime, thriller, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, historical and romance. This makes the Western interestingly problematic; the poor relations’ poorer relation. Since the Western reached a kind of apex in cinema, it is unsurprising that we find it in the oeuvres of great directors: Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, Campion’s The Power Of The Dog, Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. In literature, less so. When republished as classics, such as Zane Grey’s Riders Of The Purple Sage or Louis L’Amour’s Silver Canyon, they are presented as curiosities.

There are Westerns that supposedly bookish types would not blanch or flush to be seen reading. Cormac McCarthy is rightly recognised as a towering figure in American literature. Larry McMurty won the Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove. Percival Everett, Hernán Diaz, Sebastian Barry, E Annie Proulx, Téa Obreht and Patrick de Witt have all written sort of, takes on, quirky versions of, kind-of-inspired-by Westerns. To this group of Westerns-with-qualifications can be added Kevin Barry’s The Heart In Winter. It is unmistakably a Kevin Barry novel, and it is equally clearly a Western. It has that distinctive combination of the mythic and the dislocated. That Westerns were never written in the age when Westerns were set perhaps gives them their out-of-kilter edge of strangeness, even in their dime-store origins.

Barry winks at the idea of the Westerns as formulaic in a typical aside. Going through pockets not his own, the protagonist discovers “Second was a cutting from a Philadelphia newspaper of recent times that offered an article of instruction – The Twelve Rules For Writing Western Adventures. Tom Rourke took the cutting and studied it a while in grave and scholastic silence. Then, sourly – There’s fucken twelve of ’em?” Tom is a photographer’s assistant, amateur composer of ballads, ne-er-do-well and opium addict in Butte, Montana in 1891. He supplements his income by writing love letters for single men seeking to obtain a wife. According to one acquaintance “there’s a kind of witchery about him”; another maintains he “speaks to the dead… he believes that he’ll be with them soon enough. He’s not long for the stations is the boy’s own read”. Butte’s sheriff muses that the “deathhauntedness” of the Irish was “frequently a complication”. “Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation”.

Main Street, Butte City, Montana, circa 1897. PIC: The Print Collector/Getty Images

One of Tom’s epistolary amours may have been on behalf of Harrington, a pious, self-flagellating mine captain, and when Polly arrives her elopement with Tom is an inevitability. They head west, and as convention demands, they are pursued. Everything is cleverly and eerily askance, from the Cornish foot-fetishist vigilante to the “mixblood” Métis with a line in psilocybins and scratch mazurka parties, to the “Reverend” who is convinced that spiritual warfare is conducted by microbes, and the best defence against these “infinitesimal and God-denying creatures of the gut interior” is Tres Sombreros tequila.

The excellence of Barry’s work is difficult to quantify. His prose has an unusual quality; a laughter than is by turns mocking, sly, despairing and disbelieving, yet it is never vicious. This novel could not be described as a comedy – it is too full of pathos, regret, disappointment and reasonless suffering – yet it is not exactly tragic, and it is certainly not maudlin. It is too easy to compare it to Samuel Beckett as it has its own quite astonishing lack of despair; just as the linguistic innovation might be compared to James Joyce, but the lilt and timbre is subtly different. At times, the way the narrative unspools seems like a wind-up story, at times the sudden shifts in time are disconcerting, as in “The sky was darkening. He was premonitory again.” Or there is the distancing jolt in “But she believed that then and she believes it still”, suddenly introducing a different temporal perspective. The jacket says the book was “twenty-five years in the making” and when I read a sentence like “A pale fury burned in the godhaunts of his jealous grey eyes”, I can easily believe it might take that long to make the sentence just that right (take out the “jealous” for example and see how it flabs apart). The registers shift almost seamlessly, making a novel of just over 200 pages seem twice as long. In less than a paragraph he can juggle “unspeakable net curtain”, “three summer’s weight of petrified flycorpse”, “rum old bugger of a place to be laid up in” and “against the mountain air on a philosophical basis” – it apparently makes a man “overly inclined towards company of an evening”. Again, towards rather than to is perfect.

Barry is one of the joys of the age. Much though I loved City of Bohane, Beetlebone and Night Boat to Tangier, this is the novel I would give to a sceptic to persuade them that he is a genius.

The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, Canongate, £16.99