#BookReview of #TheHeartInWinter by Kevin Barry

What if we ride out tonight?
What if we ride out and never once look back?
– The Heart in Winter

[ About The Heart in Winter ]

October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers.

Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast …

[ My Review ]

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry published June 6^th with Canongate and is described as ‘a savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West’. I have been very lucky to hear Kevin Barry do a live reading in Waterstones Cork a few years ago when he launched Night Boat to Tangier. Kevin Barry brings his words, and the world that his characters inhabit, to life, adding an extraordinary layer to his stories. I was away recently, so I missed Kevin Barry’s event in Waterstones for The Heart in Winter which I believe was, as expected, packed to the rafters. If you ever get an opportunity to hear him live, my advice would be not to think twice about it.

My Dad introduced me to the poetry of Robert Service, in particular ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’. Recently I picked up a copy of one of his early collections, Songs of a Sourdough, for my Dad, which was first published in 1907. Robert Service was fascinated by the Yukon gold miners and the wilderness of the west earning him the moniker of ‘bard of the Yukon’. Robert Service was known for his ‘rollicking ballads’ and it was his writing that I immediately thought of when reading The Heart in Winter.  

Central to Kevin Barry’s latest novel is a character called Tom Rourke, ‘a young poet and balladmaker’ from The Beara Peninsula in West Cork. It’s 1891 in Butte, Montana, home to many a Cork immigrant, who left the copper mines of Allihies and brought their skill set to a place that became known as ‘the richest hill on earth’. Over 1,200 men left Beara and set up new lives for themselves in this copper and silver rich part of the world but not all were successful, and their lives were very tough.

It is here that Tom Rourke scrapped a living but not as a miner. He had a good heart but was also a man of low morals, drinking all night, addicted to dope, scrounging to get by.

‘The eggs went down controversially. The coffee began to straighten the affair. He rolled a smoke to find the hands were passable steady by this stage. Once more and gauntly he considered the situation. He wrote songs for the bars and letters for the lonesome. He was the assistant to the photographer Lonegan Crane, a lunatic of Leytonstone, East London, originally. His days had been passing with no weight to them, but he knew now that fate would soon arrest him.’

And fate certainly did intervene when Tom Rourke set eyes on Polly Gillespie, the new wife of Captain Long Anthony Harrington, another West Cork man but one of very different morals. Harrington was a devout Christian and, very soon after arrival, Polly knew that her marriage was to be a joyless affair. With Tom Rourke a very different adventure awaited and, in a gamble, the two steal a horse and literally make for the hills, hoping to escape the posse who they know will be sent to track them down.

“If we die tonight?
Don’t say it, Polly.
But if we die tonight I wouldn’t even care one way or the other.
I feel much the same way about it.”

With the unique style associated with Kevin Barry, the reader is taken on a journey through the mountains and valleys of Montana and beyond as the two lovers cross paths with friend and foe. The dialogue is pure Kevin Barry with a narrative that is smart and entertaining, injected with copious amounts of stylised phrasing that is pure magic. I was fascinated by the story of the Allihies men making a life for themselves so very far from home and reading The Heart in Winter put me in mind of these words from Robert Service:

“Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear:
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and read, the North Lights swept in bars? –
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant…
hunger and night and the stars.”
– The Shooting of Dan McGrew

The Heart in Winter is, at times, a very bleak and remorseless tale. It’s a very powerful reading experience, one not to be taken as a light piece of fiction, but it’s worth the investment. Montana in 1891 springs to life from the pages as Kevin Barry depicts a cast of strong characters set against the harsh and ofttimes brutal backdrop of life in the wild west. With Barry’s trademark humour, he entertains the reader with stunning use of language and strong visuals. A book I will return to, The Heart in Winter is eloquently written and an extremely entertaining novel, a ballad in book form so to speak. It’s ballsy. It’s challenging. It’s brilliant. Kevin Barry is a wordsmith, a charmer, an original personality, whose writing continues to delight.

[ Bio ]

Kevin Barry is the author of four novels and three story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.  His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. His novel Night Boat to Tangier was an Irish number one bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was named one of the top ten books by the New York Times. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland.