[Example] Like its Montana setting, Kevin Barry’s novel is brutal and gorgeous

TOM ROURKE is a dope fiend with one foot already in the grave. He fancies himself a poet; the rest of Butte, Montana, fancies him a “mad little Irish motherfucker”. When he meets Polly Gillespie, newly wed to another man, both feel something shift. They don’t loiter long in Butte. The lovers strike out together for Pocatello, Idaho, from which they plan to ride the rails to San Francisco—and to freedom.

From the very beginning of “The Heart in Winter”, a tragedy seems to be in the offing. This is typical of Kevin Barry, who writes lyrically of melancholic Irishmen. His previous book, “Night Boat to Tangier”, about two aged gangsters, was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2019. In this new novel, as in that one, a sense of foreboding is shot through with dark humour.

Here Mr Barry’s concern is the Irish diaspora and the men who crossed the Atlantic to toil in the copper mines of boomtowns in the 1890s. Tom is one of these emigrants, though he prefers to eke out a living by writing songs and love letters on commission rather than down the mines.

It is tempting for writers contemplating the American West to try to craft a story as grand as the land itself, an epic tale that roves across half the continent. Mr Barry does not shy away from using the landscape—his lovers traverse the wilds between Butte and Pocatello partly on horseback—but the yarn is intimate in scope. This love story revolves around the impetuousness and restlessness of the two main characters. Before meeting Polly, Tom haunts the streets of Butte searching for drugs, and for God. Sometimes he finds both, as when “He took a smoke of what meagre dope he had left…and he experienced the truth and glory of God the Almighty in the here and now of the opiate night.”

Yet the couple’s escapades do reflect the two sacred tenets of a great Western novel: a reverence for the landscape and an awareness of its brutality. Readers may see flashes of Cormac McCarthy, whose Westerns are filled with a violence he saw as endemic to the region, or glimpse the influence of Jack Kerouac, whose characters in “On the Road” careen across the country in search of feeling. Both Tom and Polly are bloodied on their journey. But “Love and death they coexist in our violent and sentimental world,” Mr Barry writes. “They might even depend one on the other.”■