To avoid plot spoiling, let me say that what we assume is a two-hander crime novel swells with plenitude into an emotionally crushing panorama of two friends gone wildly astray, punished by regret but with their grim solidarity intact – so far. This is not a journey devoid of dark humour; there are back-breaking moments of mirth, as well as real madness and love ... [a] devastatingly vivid portrayal of serious crime and its real consequences ... Barry...is a clairvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary. The prose is a caress, rolling out in swift, spaced paragraphs, a telegraphese of fleeting consciousness ... Barry’s sensibility is eerie; he is attuned to spirits, to malevolent presences, the psychic tundra around us. But what distinguishes this book beyond its humour, terror and beauty of description is its moral perception. For this is no liberal forgiveness tract for naughty boys: it is a plunging spiritual immersion into the parlous souls of wrongful men.
... it’s Barry’s voice that propels us through the work, through paragraphs punctuated by turns of phrase that deliver little jolts of pleasure. Like their author, his characters are aware of the implications and ironies of language ... Barry’s control of tone is so assured that he can turn a fragment of autobiography, confession, and apology into a terrifying threat ... No matter how funny and smart, abrasive and irreverent the dialogue is, we’re never allowed to forget that 'their talk is a shield against feeling' ... Night Boat to Tangier is about the present and the past, about memory and loss, which is partly why it’s a sadder and more beautiful book [than Barry's City of Bohane] ... The unconventional paragraphing compels us to focus; there’s no room for the mind to wander in the midst of a long passage of prose ... formally daring and inventive ... I’ve missed Maurice and Charlie ever since I finished Barry’s novel ... Night Boat to Tangier—and much of Barry’s work—inspires us to rethink our ideas of character, of compassion and forgiveness. Without romanticizing crime, they humanize the criminal.
... mordant Irish wit and banter. The end result is a cross between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges; sad and funny in equal measure ... The scenes in the ferry terminal are written like a screenplay: all dialogue and stage directions, with next to nothing else besides ... as with everything Barry writes, it’s the language that grips you by the throat — just so lyrically Irish ... Among the next generation of writers — Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and so on — the one that stands above the rest for ambition, language and sheer verve is Barry ... If you haven’t heard of him yet, you soon will. I’d wager he’ll wind up with the Nobel Prize for Literature before he’s done ... While Night Boat to Tangier doesn’t quite hit the heady heights of his earlier work (or his astonishingly good collections of short stories) it’s still a first-rate read.
... buoyant ... like Beckett’s Godot, is about the wait. It’s about hunkering down and admitting the presence of old ghosts. The reason Night Boat to Tangier works is that Maurice and Charlie are vivid company on the page, a couple of battered and slightly sinister vaudevillians on a late-career mental walkabout. They might have fallen out of an early Tom Waits ballad, a chest fever splashing over minor seventh chords ... This novel is hard to quote. Nearly every other sentence contains pungent Anglo-Saxon nouns and gerunds. If you stripped them all out, this novel would lose eight percent of its body weight ... There’s an overemotional side to Night Boat to Tangier, and Barry sometimes lays it on fairly thick ... But Barry is such a deft and generous writer that he gets the honey-to-acid blend almost exactly right. He also spackles his novel with poetic utterances that tend to land neatly ... We’ve met guys like Maurice and Charlie before, of course...But Barry manages to make this territory his own, and to make it fresh.
Kevin Barry is the only author I know of (currently working) whose work equally inspires and inundates any aspirant with dread. His latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier...is undoubtedly his best novel yet, and, I'd argue, his strongest fiction, period—which is saying something, given that Kevin Barry's one of the best short story writers alive ... Barry is that good; and with Night Boat to Tangier, it's clear he's not only very very good, but he’s getting better ... Charlie's and Maurice's criminality makes this story somehow (I can't believe I'm saying this) more human, more relatable, than it would otherwise be with some PG-level old folks ... And so part of the delicious joy of Night Boat to Tangier is trying to suss out and bear witness to Charlie and Maurice as they attempt to decipher what their own moral code is ... Because here’s the thing: Charlie and Maurice are extraordinarily compelling characters; they’re flawed and fucked and terrible, and I’d be deeply nervous if someone like either of them knew my name or address. Yet, the slow-burning love story of their friendship—and love story feels a stretch, but I can’t think of what else it is—is devastating by the end ... Barry is blowing up language left, right, and center in his books, and the wild excellence of his masterful control is enough to leave you, if not gasping, then at least grasping for some tool to continually underline things ... His non-dialogue writing is just as sharp; this is a guy who can nail details like he’s throwing knives ... I’m not sure what else to tell you: Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier should be essential reading for anyone with a heart, or anyone with a desire to know what a heart beating desperately, if uncertainly, reads or feels like. It’s a profoundly good book.
...a darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal, haunted lineage and squandered chances ... Barry rightly landed on the Booker Prize longlist with this, his beautifully paced, emotionally wise third novel. Spare in its prose, capacious in its understanding, it’s as eerily attuned as his last one...to the ancient spirits that flit through the Irish landscape, and as festering with unsavory personages as his debut ... In his lilting voice, with language whose textures tap all the senses (language that can be, in its casual, colorful profanity, difficult to quote here), Barry will lull you right under his spell and into a wary sympathy for the pain of these men with their battered, hopeful hearts. You will feel this even as you recognize that they’d be perfectly at home in, say, the world of Martin McDonagh’s movie In Bruges. Explosive, uncalled-for violence doesn’t ruffle them a whit.
Night Boat to Tangier is further evidence that Barry...is a writer of inspired prose, a funny and perceptive artist who can imbue a small story with tremendous depth ... melancholy...shapes every relationship in the book ... Night Boat to Tangier is more controlled [than Beatlebone], more mature, a sad, lyrical beauty of a novel about regret, from a dependably entertaining and perceptive writer.
Barry has dialogue ears that were trained while one hand stopped a pint from escaping. That is, he is good at Man Talk. But he is also an expert in the field of language performed as a ritual in response to certain promptings. Such is his expertise that it’s easy to imagine him conversing happily with your granny between bingo calls ... Barry is wide-open to the supernatural, as if there wasn’t enough around here to keep you fretting into the afterlife. The book is woozy with lines ... The relationship between Barry’s imagination and his style is akin to that between a gang of dogs and a sledge – a sledge from which the driver was pitched into a ravine some way back ... Night Boat to Tangier moves at the speed of today turning into tomorrow when you’re not paying attention, but I still found it settled comfortably in the noirish ambience created by Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Barry channels the music in every voice, from lowlife philosopher to slow-footed thug, ponderous wit to fluting child — and the comic genius in everyone, whether unfunny fool or God’s own comedian ... for readers, it will end too soon.
Back story is where novels often sag, but in this case it’s where the book hits its propulsive stride. Around 40 pages in, a series of excursions into the men’s pasts starts to fill us in on their intimately linked criminal and romantic histories ... The detours have the nonlinear, emotion-drenched agility of memory, moving by association through powerfully evoked moments in tense bedrooms, piratical bars and dubious neighborhoods in Irish or Mediterranean cities. Barry has a great gift for getting the atmospheres of sketchy social hubs in a few phosphorescent lines, and much of the pleasure of the book is in being transported from one den of iniquity to another, effortlessly and at high speed ... There isn’t much psychological or (God forbid) moral analysis, so if you like your dark deeds illuminated by Dostoyevskian insight this might not be the book for you. But the sheer lyric intensity with which it brings its variously warped and ruined souls into being will be more than enough for most readers. It certainly was for me.
Barry...doesn’t just traffic in nifty dialogue and gratuitous nastiness (although there are startlingly abrupt revelations in Night Boat). This story has heart too ... Barry’s own twisting, inviting authorial voice seems to lean on our shoulder, to guide us through ... Within this generously spaced novel of restless short paragraphs, such sections at times skate and scurry through the years, rather than digging deep. But there is also a gorgeous wooziness, and soft-boiled vulnerability, to some of Maurice’s memories, as well as the acute, sour sharpness of lust and jealousy, paranoia and self-loathing ... Barry’s descriptions are often startlingly good. He slides words and images across one another, to create some new, precise image ... the book doesn’t cloy with stereotyped Irish folklore, thank god – but it does lend a shivery undercurrent.
Barry writes with real exuberance ... But all the working-class Irish slang...and pickled wit can’t hide the flimsiness of the story ... at times it reads like a pastiche of the Irish playwrights Samuel Beckett and Martin McDonagh, whose male double acts manage to be hilarious and threatening just by mooching about. Sure enough, the publisher is dubbing it 'Waiting for Godot meets In Bruges'. But the bleak humour and lyrical zaniness seem forced, the promised violence rarely menacing. If this is Barry being his best bad self… well, it feels like someone coming to a fancy-dress party in a £29.99 gangster costume from Amazon ... the novel is a long horny growl about the broken-down lives and broken-down dreams of old rascals. [Barry] says he writes for people who 'read with their ears', but it’s like a song missing a melody, a play awaiting actors ... The dangers of turning a script into fiction are many and Barry skirts none of them. A novel needs interiority, an intimacy between characters and reader, a simultaneous conveyance of narrative and commentary. Barry does the bare minimum.
Barry’s concerns have changed since 2007, but there has been no slackening off. The male codependents in his latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier, are proudly reptilian. As they announce with indecent pride, they wear excellent fucking shoes. Barry specialises in character pairings—death-driven, addicted to each other—in a way reminiscent of Beckett. ... If There Are Little Kingdoms captured the languor and long afternoons that come with life on the dole, then time is not on the side of the protagonists in Night Boat to Tangier ... Barry has always been exceptionally attentive to the silences of men, with an eye sympathetically trained on their weaknesses, on their secrets, their irritations, their routines, their obsessions, their inadequate responses, the frustration caused by their inadequate responses ... The blank spaces that Barry inserts between paragraphs, the empty gaps in the text, seem to signify accumulated pain.
At times, Barry’s book feels like a mixture of Waiting for Godot, the classic theatrical portrait of stasis and circularity, and Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, the poem that begins 'That is no country for old men' and expresses the need to use language and travel to ward off bodily decay ... At other times the novel feels like an attempt to forge a new type of mystic miserabilism – a collaboration between Don DeLillo and Philip Larkin, with a desolate landscape providing the stage for long, gnomic conversations about time ... A possible advantage of using literary types and tropes is the avoidance of heavy lifting. A dash of Godot might have worked as shorthand, sparing Barry and his reader pages of nonsense blather, but it doesn’t. And though his duo’s dynamic is quickly established, Barry seems keen to go on asserting their characteristics ... A problem with the book’s construction is that Barry must wring a great deal of interest from a scenario before he can divulge its basic facts. By reeling back and then moving forwards, he is obliged to deal last of all with the most pertinent details. The majority of the past events precede, without directly illuminating, the present moment ... [Barry's] novel’s scheme is ill-suited to its needs.
Readers might find it an effort getting their minds around this story. Barry does not use dialogue quotes and much of the narrative is delivered in short, jerky paragraphs. But the writing has a poetic quality ... Reading Night Boat to Tangier, one might hear echoes of the Talking Heads’ singing 'Once in a Lifetime,' and you ask yourself, 'How did I get here?'
...[a] dark, haunting novel ... It's tough to turn a story that's essentially just two people waiting for someone into a gripping narrative, but Barry manages to do just that ... Barry has a knack for dialogue that keeps the book moving; the running conversation between Maurice and Charlie is dark and often very funny ... As was evident in his previous novels, Beatlebone and City of Bohane, Barry's a remarkable sentence-level writer who's capable of extraordinary turns of phrase ... Novels that deal with subject matter as dark as this one run the risk of becoming suffocating, or collapsing under the weight of their gloom. But Barry avoids this trap by painting all of the characters as fully human — Maurice and Charlie behave monstrously, but the reader still feels for them ... Night Boat to Tangier is remarkable, a novel that's both grim and compassionate, and it features gorgeous writing on every page. Barry never asks the reader to pity his characters; rather, he makes it nearly impossible not to relate to them, which is a remarkable trick. It's not a novel that tries to teach lessons, except for maybe one: 'Hate is not the answer to love; death is the answer.'
There are no words, at times, to describe what Kevin Barry does with words. In this latest novel, the Irish writer has almost invented a new genre, a fascinating hybrid of poetry, prose and drama ... draws on the terrific vernacular energy in Irish English that is animating the best of Irish writing at present by the likes of Rob Doyle, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett. This is a remarkably achieved novel which shows a writer in full command of the possibilities of the form.
If the set-up evokes Beckett the dramatist, the language of Night Boat to Tangier is much more like that of Beckett the novelist. It is written in a kind of ornate pub-lyricism that casts into relief the grime and squalor of its subjects ... This is rich fare, and Barry’s strident image-making can threaten to take over at times. Why need a payphone be a 'coin phone'? Are a line of larches really 'primly erect, arrogant as surgeons'? ... it is testament to Barry’s ear that he is fully aware of the threat, and to his skill that his prose never reaches its sell-by date.
Two Irishmen waiting and talking inevitably recalls Samuel Beckett, and, like Waiting for Godot, this hypnotically beautiful tone poem is both wildly comic and deeply sad ... Through it all, though, it is the mercurial personalities of Maurice and Charlie and the depths of their storm-tossed friendship that elevate this dank night in a shady ferry terminal into a transformative celebration of language itself.
Barry is a writer of the first rate, and his prose is at turns lean and lyrical, but always precise. Though some scenes land as stiff and schematic, the characters’ banter is wildly and inventively coarse, and something to behold . As far as bleak Irish fiction goes, this is black tar heroin.
In this gifted Irish writer’s muscular, magical, and often salty prose, several lives take shape as two older men look for a young woman in a ferry terminal ... Mostly the two men talk, with a profligate, profane, comic splendor that mixes slang, Gaelic, artful insult, and the liturgy of long friendship. Barry (Beatlebone, 2015, etc.) delights in the sound of two voices at play ... Barry adds an exceptional chapter to the literary history of a country that inspires cruelty and comedy and uncommon writing.
