There’s a special pleasure in picking up a new Kevin Barry book. I know I’m likely in for a wild ride of a story and sentences that force the English language into strange and musical shapes ... It’s a rollicking, shocking, bloody, gorgeous tale with a heroine who gets the last word.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Heart in Winter is not top-shelf Kevin Barry. He never quite gets a handle on these characters ... Because Barry is Barry, moments of comic wonderment sneak in through the pantry door ... Perhaps fearing he would give his readers too little, Barry has given them too much. It’s a great quality in a host, except when it isn’t.
Gets underway with an exhilarating account of a long and riotous night’s journey into day ... Barry is a writer who refuses to be pigeonholed, one whose novels feature fresh displays of stylistic dexterity and explore different fictional terrain ... Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive ... Barry’s other main trademark trope is his lyrical prose. We revel in his use of vivid language, whether his characters’ terse, hard-bitten vernacular or his original imagery ... Some of Barry’s scenes are mere snapshot sketches that are too short and impressionistic for their own good. Equally disappointing is the novel’s somewhat abrupt ending. However, these flaws are easily outweighed by the book’s many strengths, in particular its well-drawn fugitives. They run and we keep up, emotionally invested in their shared exploits and their individual fates.
A rare thing. The Irish writer Kevin Barry’s fourth novel is a strongly plotted book that offers a doomed love affair, horses, high mountains, bad weather, a desperate journey and even a knife fight; a Western, in short, and a good one. But that plot is the least compelling thing about it, and the novel’s real force lies in the mordant wit of its language ... Barry’s sentences are often long and flowing and yet sharply angled too. They lilt but don’t lull, and are virtually impossible to quote at length ... What sets him apart is the bright black hole, the grim laughter, of his language, with his sentences all “bass tones and bottom.” This short, tight novel pulls one so swiftly along that it can be read on a summer’s afternoon.
Barry is an Irish writer to the core with his wild, dark humor and his Gaelic intonations, a beautifully skewed syntax holding up a delicate balance of spluttering facetiousness and a sly acknowledgment of inevitable tragedy ... Barry’s writing often seems like a tornado’s mix of James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Flannery O’Connor. But what comes flying out of the tornado is pure, unmitigated Barry.
It’s typical Barry. His characters are driven by a sense of destiny and not a little fantasy ... This should, by rights, be a very bad book. But no one writes prose like Barry, and he reaches a kind of pitch here ... Barry’s short stories have a dark, dense profundity, and the same focus on male desire, but they’re truer to life and closer to home.
The story takes on a mythical dimension, with hints and echoes from direful legend and foreboding balladry ... It was an inspired choice to take the medieval romance and recast it in a raunchy, energetic and idiomatic mode. What is especially striking about this novel is the way it manages to be both generic and singular in feeling and tempo, with its historical evocations, ominous unfolding, dense atmosphere and moments of sardonic asperity.
Barry is a master of loose talk and wild ideas ... Barry has written a vaudeville masterpiece, gaudy, ragged and irrepressible ... Barry’s sympathies are by turns comic and scarifying, the balance between which sets the novel’s tone at large ... Her worn quietude is the novel’s steady centre and the sign of what Barry’s scouring prose sometimes hides, which is the emotional range of his stories and his care for quiet in the chaos. For all its palpitations, The Heart in Winter has a persistent rhythm that is sign of a style to come, no matter how bitter the weather.
Barry’s books are known for their stylistic brilliance, and The Heart in Winter is no exception. Terse and acrobatic, the novel effortlessly walks the line between goofy and gothic ... Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised.
This is a book where everything springs alive from the page, so you need to take it slowly. Doing so gives the short atmospheric scenes time to marinate in the mind and adds an epic feel despite the novel’s brevity; the style, peppered with run-on sentences and hardly any commas, has a dash of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis to it ... The fun of the romp recedes and the closing chapters offer a different, satisfying register in a minor key, a break from the pace but with new depth. It’s a risk, but that is what Barry’s writing is all about, after all. He has made it pay off before, and he does it again here.
Captivating, comically lewd ... Though he rarely strays from a conversational voice, the author’s technique is gratifyingly various: he strings together declarative sentences, pronouns followed immediately by verbs and clauses, to create a terse, chewy texture ... Like all brilliant dramatists, Barry wears the twin masks of tragedy and comedy with equal grace.
So … you may be thinking two lovers on the lam? Haven’t we read/seen/heard this before? Sure. But the thing about Kevin Barry is that his irresistible blend of hilarity and gothic tragedy brings new life to all the genres he’s referencing here; the plot almost doesn’t matter. His descriptions, like this one of the formidable Jago Marrak, one of the bounty hunters in hot pursuit of the doomed pair, are irresistible.
The Heart in Winter could be a prequel to his futuristic debut novel, City of Bohane. Barry’s new novel has the same manic lyricism, the same rhythms of Irish speech, a similar ribald Irish diction, and the humor that cuts both to the funny bone and the solar plexus. Barry’s writing often seems like a tornado’s mix of James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Flannery O’Connor. But what comes flying out of the tornado is pure, unmitigated Barry ... Beneath Barry’s comic surfaces and surprising idioms heartbreak always lurks...Polly’s story, like Tom’s, is a dark inevitability. Broken hearts are scattered through the story. The reader’s included.
The Heart in Winter is both a romance and a travelogue. It is filled with lust and knife fights and people of a contemplative bearing whose existential concerns can be intimated in the little 'V' that forms between their eyebrows. In other words, life is hard in America in 1891, and pity the fool who dares to hope otherwise. Barry brings all this to the page in a sensory overload of language and imagery, and with boundless impish glee. What a writer he is.
despite the interesting prose and fairly fast-paced plot, The Heart in Winter is an uneven piece of workmanship. Much of the plot feels precipitate, and the book’s narrative thrust is rather jolty. Besides their love of profanity, Barry’s characters are distinct enough, but their outlines are all a tad hazy. Barry might have been going for subtle characterization, but he has only managed slightly watered-down characterization. Things in The Heart in Winter happen, people get drunk and say cynical things, but none of it is very compelling. The feeling of emptiness that the novel’s tone creates is magnified by the uneven plot and not-fully-realized characters. By the time the story is finished, the reader will be left wishing there had been something more in the novel, more depth and conviction. The book’s prose style will be remembered by the reader, but it is doubtful that much else will.
The tale of slightly guilty innocents being chased through the rugged West by vengeful hired gunmen isn’t exactly new, and neither is the blunt and graphic violence that Tom and Polly are never more than a few steps ahead of. But The Heart in Winter is made individual by its raucous sexuality and by the sheer delight to be had in the characters’ sloppy attempts to topple fate. Imagine if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor ... The music of Barry’s language is the engine of that journey, so readers’ reaction to the book will depend on their reaction to the prose. Perhaps Barry is on shakier ground here than with his masterpiece, Night Boat to Tangier. He has a powerful gift for metaphor and description, and I marked dozens of phrases that I wish I’d written myself. But for some readers, beautiful phrasing isn’t the proper goal of what is ultimately an adventure novel.
That may sound like a garden-variety Wild West tale, but Barry distinguishes it with philosophical heft, erudite discussions of religion and free will, and much else. And no one can top the grungy poetry of Barry's writing, with characters like the stranger in priest's collar who's 'sleeping ravenously in a covered wagon' and calls himself the 'voice of Zion in an epoch of whores and liars.' There's nothing cookie-cutter about lines like those in this magnificent work.
Rip-roaring ... The action is rendered in crisp and gritty prose, and the sensual descriptions of Tom and Polly’s lovemaking are gloriously over-the-top. The pleasure never lets up in Barry’s masterful novel.
