City of Bohane, the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy … In prose that is both dense and flowing, Barry takes us on a roaring journey, among human beings who are trapped in life its own damned self. Nostalgia grips many of them, even when they slash angrily at sentimentality. None of it is real, yet all of it feels true … Reading this novel, with all of its violence, I also felt a kind of joy exuding from its author. The joy of finding, and sustaining, a voice. The joy of being surprised by his own inventions. I suspect that any reader, including the Irish, will sense that joy. It’s about freedom.
Bohane is a cutthroat warren of sparring gangs and sinister alleyways, a hybrid place full of warriors and wastrels that can still, for all the infighting, speak with a collective ‘we’ that constantly gauges its own bad moods … Within Barry’s narrative world, it matters less who was betrayed and what was suppressed than that things are besmirched. History hurt; you learned it by rote; now get on with your dancing and dying. The plot of the novel, simple and generic but great fun, gets on fine … Barry has written a ripping good tale about dangerous people wrestling for control of an uncontrollable place, which is at once the best caricature of contemporary Ireland yet to appear this century and a book that seems willfully disinterested in claiming that title.
...inspired and emotionally rich … Though he spins a great tale, the most important facet of City of Bohane isn't its plot. What really matters, what distinguishes the novel from so many others, is Barry's lively, original and charismatic voice. A native of Limerick, Ireland, who's in his early 40s, Barry has a linguist's ear for colloquialism, an anthropologist's eye for detail and a daffy fantasist's appreciation for tall tales.
Kevin Barry is a great storyteller, and the twists and turns of City of Bohane are satisfying, if, in places, familiar (all gangland narratives seem compelled to have the same dreary combination of over-sentimentality and violence). But as Ol' Boy Mannion says at one point, ‘Bohane City don't always gots to be a gang-fight story. We can give 'em a good aul tangle o' romance an' all, y'check me?’ And romance there is. Fashion, too … Barry's vernacular, like his plot, is a wonderful blend of past, present and imagined future. He doesn't overdo it. His characters all have different voices, and his free indirect style changes as it moves across the city. Sometimes the words are doing backflips and spinning on their heads. Sometimes they are just watching.
The opening paragraph of Kevin Barry’s debut novel describes the river that cuts through this futuristic Irish city, fallen to rabble and class divide, the all-knowing voice of his aptly-chosen, first-person omniscient narrator imbued with a musical prose that at once reels us in … City of Bohane’s success as a novel owes a large debt to Barry’s choices in language and point-of-view which allow us to dip in and out of this motley crew, each of them rife with brutality and vulnerability … Barry gives his characters the full attention they are due, no matter their role; in a few flashing lines, the individual is before us, living and breathing, drinking and scuffling. Barry isn’t afraid to linger, the omniscient first-person providing the advantages of third, and lures us closer, until we fall enamored.
Barry’s debut novel, a near-future noir, takes readers on a walking tour of Bohane, an apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland’s west coast … The novel reads as if China Miéville and Irvine Welsh had collaborated to update Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Although this sort of future-shock noir is nothing new and the elliptical narrative peters out before it reaches its inconclusive climax, the author succeeds with a continual barrage of hybrid language reminiscent of Anthony Burgess at his A Clockwork Orange best.
Roll up Joyce, Dickens, Anthony Burgess and Marty Scorsese, sprinkle with a dash of Terry Gilliam, and smoke up. That’s roughly the literary experience to be had from ingesting this marvelously mashed-up creation from Irish storyteller Barry … The familiar gangland drama won’t come as any great surprise, pulling in traces of pulp fiction, cop flicks and the grittier dystopian films into its gravity, but its style is breathlessly cool. Barry’s addictive dialect and faultless confidence make this volatile novel a rare treat.
