He spoke from his home, a quaint whitewashed cottage in rural County Sligo in northwest Ireland, where he lives with his wife, the academic and editor Olivia Smith. A pink yoga mat lay rolled up beside the fireplace: Barry, 55, with a full beard and wild, thick reddish hair, practices daily. The house, he said, dates from the 1840s and was originally a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. (The bathroom still has bars on the windows.) The couple moved in in 2007, the same week Barry’s first book, a collection of stories called There Are Little Kingdoms, was published, which launched him onto the Irish literary scene and won him the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Since then he has written two more story collections and now four novels.
The Heart in Winter is a western and a love story, which would be a departure for Barry if all his novels hadn’t been departures. City of Bohane (2011) is set in a gangster-dominated Irish dystopia of the future; Beatlebone (2015) is about John Lennon’s time on an Irish island he owned; Night Boat to Tangier (2019) is a Beckettian two-person play about drug dealers in a Spanish port. “I’m afraid of repeating myself,” Barry said. “I’d be bored. And if I’m bored, it’ll rub off on me.”
It has taken Barry 25 years, in one way or another, to write the new novel. The idea came to him when he travelled to the US for a few weeks in 1999 as a freelance reporter. (He showed me his recently rediscovered diary from that time, with “TO AMERICA!!!” scrawled across the top of the page.) One of the places he visited was Butte, Montana, by some accounts the most Irish town in America – which gave him the idea for a book. “As a native Irishman, I was given a royal welcome. I remember sitting in the Capri Motel and gathering all the great material about the bars and brothels and opium parlours and the 10,000 Irish miners who had come over from West Cork. I thought, this is going to be a gold … and it just wasn’t there.”
Barry explained that he believed that “ambition and ability are often in a difficult balance at the beginning of a writing career. You’re trying to write things you’re not ready for. When I started writing in 1999, I thought: it’s got to be epic. I’ve got to deal with the mines, I’ve got to deal with migration, I’ve got to deal with politics.” It was a case, Barry said, “of not knowing what the focus was. Usually that means you don’t have the right characters. And then they turn up 22 years later.”
The characters who appeared later (“What if it’s just a little story? What if they’re runaway lovers?” he thought) ended up being the focus of The Heart in Winter: Irish immigrant Tom Rourke and his lover Polly Gillespie, who leaves her husband to be with Tom. Barry experimented with the characters for two weeks, trying to find their voices, and suddenly the book took off. Tom and Polly steal some money and escape together on a journey west through 1890s America, pursued by the law, Polly’s husband and hired Cornish gunslingers with names that can roll around in the reader’s mouth: Jago Marrak, Kitto Pengelly, Caden Spargo.
Earlier, Barry showed me the small room where he writes his books, separate from the main residence and next to his thriving vegetable garden (“Make sure you get that in”). The workspace is a long, narrow room, no WiFi, no distractions, just a desk and chair with a rose gold MacBook, a sofa, a dartboard and a speaker streaming choral music from his Spotify account.
Tom’s character came easily to him (“he’s a 29-year-old Irishman with literary ambitions, so I know how that feels”), but Barry was “nervous” about writing Polly, an American woman. Her voice is “very influenced by the Terrence Malick films ‘Badlands’ and ‘The Heat of the South,’ both of which use deadpan, poetic voiceovers.” These examples were “like a tuning fork for Polly’s voice.”
Once he found the tone of the characters, “the romance felt real. (Tom) doesn’t know who he is. He’s trying on different roles. (Polly) is quite sure who she is.” Satisfied that the book would work, he spent 10 blissful months finishing it, and “I was so glad to finally get it out that I was seriously tempted to dedicate the book to myself.” (His wife – the ultimate dedicatee – had to talk him out of it.)
Barry – who describes himself as “old-fashioned”; “I’ve never been to a writing workshop in my life, I don’t teach” – has always been a voice-based writer. His style, which has fully developed since the publication of his first book at age 38, followed no particular Irish tradition but had a loose precursor in the “bog gothic” of Patrick McCabe. His stories, which appear regularly in The New Yorker, are offensive, grotesque and funny, in the kind of tone that describes a hot day by saying, “The dogs didn’t know what had hit them.”
Today he alternates between writing novels and short story collections, although he still values the short form. “If you’re naturally impatient like me,” he says, “the idea of having something finished on your desk in a relatively short space of time is very appealing.” His work is characterized by powerful dialogue and a mixture of cool satire and open emotion that is sometimes reminiscent of George Saunders.
“I’m basically a comic book writer,” he said. “Because if you make them laugh, you can really focus on the more serious, darker, moving stuff.” “The Heart in Winter” touches the reader’s heart and ultimately wrings it out. (Barry’s precise control of his style extends to the recording of his own audiobooks: “Trained actors,” he laughs, grimacing at the sentence, “are not allowed!”)
Still, his writing style has evolved since the early stories. “I’m very interested in language and style, (but) I can definitely see a change in the last few books, because I’m mostly concerned with the characters. I’m with them all the time. And I miss them when they’re gone.” I’ve suggested that The Heart in Winter is his best-plotted novel. “The genre is very forgiving of plot,” he said. “In Westerns, people have to jump on horses all the time and run away.” The tension builds, but never without comedy. A sheriff, tracking Tom’s trail, growls, “The best bit of Thomas Rourke dripped down his father’s good leg.”
Also, like all of Barry’s novels, it is a relatively short book: around 45,000 words. “And I have ambitions to make it even shorter,” he said. “I love the idea of the three-hour novel. There are so many distractions in the world.” It is a strategy of self-preservation, he explained. When he does literary events, the audience is “mid-50s and older. Older readers preserve (the reading culture). I find that the young people who come to the events are almost exclusively people who are trying to write something themselves. In 20 years, this whole edifice could collapse.”
The answer, Barry concludes, is to “remove as much of the traditional features of the novel as possible. Reduce it to the essentials, make the scenes really exciting and just put the reader right in the middle of it. And then you’re right in the middle of it. And you can’t get out until you turn the last page.”
John Self is a book critic. He lives in Northern Ireland.
