The Season of Lost Souls

Hamilton Cain reviews the prolific Irish author Kevin Barry’s new literary Western, “The Heart in Winter.”

By Hamilton CainJuly 22, 2024

• Fiction

I’M NOT THE FIRST to say it, nor will I be the last: Irish writers are kicking arse, forging narratives for our fraught and fevered moment, spinning tensions between English and their Indigenous tongue into gold. Consider the gems from this past decade alone: Sally Rooney’s series of millennial touchstones, crowned, of course, by her 2018 bestseller Normal People; the edgy stories of Colin Barrett; Claire Keegan’s delicate prose poems; and the dystopias, both political and personal, constructed by the Pauls, Lynch and Murray. Is there some secret ingredient in the soda bread? I’ll have what they’re having.

This year’s main course so far is Kevin Barry’s captivating, comically lewd The Heart in Winter, a valentine to the literary Western—and confirmation that he can down a Guinness with the best of them. Barry explicitly pays tribute to Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, tipping his hat to other influences all the while. His is a short novel but large on the inside, pushing adventurous language among wide-open spaces and the starry skies above.

¤

Butte, Montana, has the highest percentage of Irish Americans per capita, eclipsing even Boston. Barry traces this anomaly to the 19th-century copper boom, when mines such as the Anaconda attracted thousands of indigent “Hibernian brethren” to the Treasure State to seek their fortune. Barry’s Butte is a multicultural sin city (the cast includes Croats, Finns, English, Chinese, and Germans) teeming with sullen laborers and petty crooks, saloons and brothels. Set mostly in late 1891, The Heart in Winter tells the sorrowful tale of one Tom Rourke—a 29-year-old balladeer and photographer’s assistant by day, a drunk and doper by night. Tom hails from County Cork, yet he disdains his own people. Like Keats before him, he’s half in love with easeful death: “Once more and gauntly he considered his situation. He wrote songs for the bars and letters for the lonesome. […] His days had been passing with no weight to them but he knew now that fate would soon arrest him.”

Romance redeems Tom for a season. The Heart in Winter opens in October: a snowfall descends on the Rocky Mountains, a harbinger of coming storms, external and internal. Enter Polly Gillespie, a kind of mail-order bride shipped from Chicago into matrimony with a pious, dull mine boss, Long Anthony Harrington. While posing for wedding portraits at Tom’s studio, Polly catches the Irishman’s eye and returns his gaze. Back home, she discovers Long Anthony’s penchant for self-flagellation, a need to punish himself to stir arousal, kink repurposed as atonement in classic iambs: “the whup the whup the whup!”

Polly carries her own emotional baggage, but something about the moony Tom suggests she can break the pattern. It only takes a few covert liaisons before she decides he’s her soulmate, and the two devise a scheme to escape, torching the hotel where Tom boards and stealing a palomino. Destination: San Francisco. Up first? A trek through rugged western Montana and Idaho, where they aim to hop a train in Pocatello.

Barry structures the pair’s journey as a picaresque. They run across outcasts: a pair of Métis who share music and mushrooms, and later the Reverend, a crazed killer who marries them. (He’s a version of McCarthy’s Judge Holden from 1985’s Blood Meridian.) Never mind that Polly’s officially a bigamist; the couple drift contentedly in the direction of Pocatello:

Sometimes he walked the horse. Mostly they rode double. The hatchwork of the trees rolled by as diorama and caused a soft hypnosis that was helpful. You went at the right clip, not too fast, and it was soothing. They fell into forest dreams as they rode. They fell into the clear sky of early winter and dreamed.

Back in Butte, Harrington’s rage blows hard. Vengeful, he falls back on his fetish:

A pale fury burned in the godhaunts of his jealous grey eyes. He wrapped the horserope thrice about his waist and cinched it and over the left shoulder he began to whip himself in a slow, rhythmic assault—

Mary, Mother of God, forgive me, he said.

Note Barry’s deft use of an em dash here, a pause that, poetry-like, draws us into Harrington’s anguish. Though he rarely strays from a conversational voice, the author’s technique is gratifyingly various: he strings together declarative sentences, pronouns followed immediately by verbs and clauses, to create a terse, chewy texture. In this way, The Heart in Winter is not only set amid the frontier of the republic, but it also stakes a claim on our language, stretching and expanding it across boundaries of vocabulary, syntax, and speech. Barry tucks an impressive array of literary and cultural Easter eggs into the novel, alluding to Borges, Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Stephen Dedalus’s deceased mother in Ulysses.

¤

Barry’s characters have long displayed a fondness for the bottle, and Tom is no exception: a drink (or several) loosens his tongue, nudging open a portal to human connection. It’s a tale as old as the Latin phrase “in vino veritas.” While still in Butte, Tom canvasses bars on streets named after minerals—Granite, Quartz, Galena—cozying up to his countrymen and offering to pen eloquent letters to potential wives back east. In this, too, alcohol plays a vertiginous role. The pages practically reek of booze—an apt motif for the intoxicating effects of passion.

Con Sullivan, Tom’s best friend in town and the cook at a beloved greasy spoon, tends to a flock of hungover miners with pastoral care. From grill to counter he serves cups of “purgatorial” coffee, sausage links, and fried eggs. Barry tapers the migraine-mood to an exquisite rhetorical question:

It was the hour of remorse at the M&M eating house. A Sunday morning, white and acheful, and a Saturday night head on every poor motherless buck sat up on a high stool, and every last one of them was family to the fat linecook Con Sullivan.

It was the season of lost souls.

The dead were plentiful on the streets of the town.

Who would be the next to join them?

Passages like this expose a thin membrane between the dead and the living in Barry’s West. An irate Harrington enlists three Cornish “Jacks”—the seven-foot giant, Jago Marrak, and his thuggish minions, Caden Spargo and Kitto Pengelly—to pursue the lovers into the wilderness. They intend to murder Tom but bring Polly back alive.

On the lam, the newlyweds meander among remote ranges and valleys, stumbling upon an abandoned cabin they call Providence, where they tarry in carnal pleasures. The delay costs them valuable time, derailing their plans, but another act unfolds amid the alleys of Pocatello, flecked with blood and sadism. (To Barry’s credit, these scenes succeed, dark in their hilarity.) For his big finish, Barry recreates a duel, two gunslingers—or knife slingers, here—squaring off, only at dusk rather than high noon, and outside a shack, beneath “an acre of starlings,” rather than at the O.K. Corral. Still, by the grand finale, there are ample corpses onstage, a tragedy Shakespearean in its flesh-mottled blades and lethal motives.

Which is to say: Like all brilliant dramatists, Barry wears the twin masks of tragedy and comedy with equal grace. (It helps that he’s a screenwriter as well, with an ear preternaturally attuned to tone and inflection.) His futuristic debut novel, City of Bohane (2011), won the International Dublin Literary Award for its evocation of how the English language might evolve in the aftermath of societal collapse; The Heart in Winter’s predecessor, Night Boat to Tangier, was named one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2019. He’s nimble with the short story form too, as his three collections attest. He has racked up major plaudits, including a Booker long-list citation—heady acclaim for an author who came to the game in his mid-thirties.

Although The Heart in Winter feels characteristically Barrian in its themes—plumbing, for instance, the depths of desire and mortality—it’s a surprisingly religious novel. Bits of Christianity are twined in its DNA; affliction finds a counterweight in the transcendent. Tom imagines a Hereafter, “a serene elevation” where he and Polly will be joined forever. Protestant Swedes, Good Samaritans, rush to his rescue and nurse him to health when’s he beaten by Caden and Kitto. Polly is hardly devout but likes to chat with God. Harrington, she observes, is a “whole other matter on the Jesus-botherin front.” In seedy, vulgar Butte, a boomtown that grinds down men and women alike, contemplation of the divine tempers suffering.

For all its ruthlessness and sexy talk, the book dwells on faith—or at the least an enduring optimism. This fundamental American creed is realized in the poignant final chapter, which owes a debt to the concluding paragraphs in True Grit: Polly’s fate aligns with that of Portis’s Mattie Ross. Time marches on.

¤

Has Barry written the Great American Novel by a non-American? A recent Washington Post profile cites the genesis of The Heart in Winter in a 1999 journalism assignment, when Barry traveled to Butte and discovered that over 10,000 Irish laborers from Ireland had migrated there, searching for work. His exiles have their limitations but also the freedom to resist our childish white-hat notions of morality and justice. And never has an outsider’s eye felt more necessary—by taking on the myths and tropes of the American West, Barry confronts the inequity in our immigrant culture, the lack of social mobility we view as the engine of our democracy. “Those who had been dispossessed would forever remain so,” he opines; “this was the golden promise of the Republic.” Or, as an elderly Swede says to Tom (translated by his grandson):

Detta löjliga land kommer att bëratta sagor för dig.

In a country like this, the boy said, all they give you is fairy tales.

Alternatively, has Barry written a Great Irish Novel situated on the other side of the drink? It’s striking how few Americans appear here. His motley crew of expatriates notice subtle inflections in each other’s accents, even among towns in Cork, whose lilts tease his prose. He’s a master of the vernacular akin to Lynch, whose Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song (2023) dispensed with quotation marks, mashing speech and description, and Murray, who performed a similar trick with punctuation in The Bee Sting (2023). Once again, Barry has composed a symphony from pinched rhythms, rambling run-ons, bawdy curses, and idiomatic refrains such as “was the truth of it.” And he sprinkles allusions to the Emerald Isle’s poverty of spirit, bowed by the yoke of a colonizing power. The offstage narrator notes that, “soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out,” adding that, for this reason, the Irish “could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.”

The mercenary Marrak comes to no good end. Despite his brutal instincts, however, there’s a tenderness to him: he yearns to pen pulp romances. The impulse reads as a wink to Barry’s deliberately sappy title. The character supplies a possible stand-in for the author:

Silently (though with his lips moving) Jago Marrak tried to compose the words of it as he led his men into the winter mountains. He saw the lovers dispersed. […] He felt the great charge of brokenheartedness that was left in the story’s wake. He heard the sombre music of the mountain passes; he listened to the eeriness of the forest deep. He had more than his characters in mind—he had them in perfect likeness on photographic paper. […] 

Jago Marrak looked up to the stars in a glaze of creation and silently composed his long billowing sentences.

Stand-in or not, this is Barry’s craft in a nutshell.

The Heart in Winter thrums with macho energy, fueled by testosterone and liquor. Musk wafts from the text. Yet Barry closes with a twist: in this high-stakes casino of domination, Polly’s the winner. Early in her relationship with Tom, she recognizes “the power she had over this half-boy half-man. It was nice.” No swaggering outlaw—not Tom Rourke, not Long Anthony Harrington, not Jago Marrak—can match her guile.

Barry’s foray into the literary Western boosts an already illustrious career. I hope to see him on stage in Stockholm someday. 

¤

Featured image: Charles Schreyvogel. My Bunkie, 1899. Gift of friends of the artist, by subscription, 1912. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (12.227). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed July 21, 2024.