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A Novel
by Kevin Barry
Book Reviewed by:Award-winning writer Kevin Barry's first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.
October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana 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 ballad-maker of the town, 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 extremely 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, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.
One
The First Encounter
On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child, like some massive obliterated eejit child, and he sang out his wares in a sweet clear lilting—
Pot-ay-toes?
Hot po-tay-toes?
Hot pot-ah-toes a pe-nny?
The first half of the novel chronicles the lovers' flight through the mountains of Montana as winter progresses. They encounter a collection of memorable, broken, and lonely personalities that encapsulate the America of the time, but could just as easily belong to the contemporary United States. The Heart in Winter reads like an oral account told by a campfire, in street whispers, or between sips in a bar, almost as an extension of the speculation that different characters engage in about the lovers' fate towards the novel's end. The language flows with a lyrical, intimate tone, where the narrator directly addresses the reader: "[A]nd sometimes their laughter can be heard in the air of that place still. Just listen in."..continued
Full Review
(634 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man
Barry's voice…propels us through [his] work, through paragraphs punctuated by turns of phrase that deliver little jolts of pleasure. Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements – the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs – brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvelous. Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
A haunting, hypnotic love story of two damaged souls. Barry's talent is breath-taking—he is a true original and, once again, words obey his call. This is a propulsive read from a writer at the height of his powers.
The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity of their families, or, perhaps most importantly, alleviate their loneliness. According to the US census, Montana in 1890 (the state and decade in which the novel is set) had a population of 85,981 males and 46,178 females. Tom helps illiterate men write letters to women back East with the objective of finding a bride. With this detail, Barry gives us a glimpse into what is often referred to as the mail-...
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