Kevin Barry is one of my favourite Irish writers so I’d been looking forward to this one for a while. Would ‘The Heart in Winter’ meet expectations, given my admiration for his previous books?

Butte, Montana

It’s 1881 in the tough copper mining town of Butte, Montana, where we first meet Irish immigrant Tom Rourke. He’s fully submerged in the various dens of iniquity which make up the town, well known in the drinking establishments. There’s something of the ruffian rebel poet to Rourke, and he’s an instantly likeable but flawed character.

Also arriving in Butte is Polly Gillespie, promised to mine Captain, Long Anthony Harrington, a man who would prefer to suffer for his pleasures. Not so Polly, believing naively that this new life would be different from the one she left, quickly feeling trapped in the marriage, and looking for a bit of colour in her life. So it’s inevitable that she should cross paths with Tom Rourke……….

Lyricism

It always takes me a few pages to adjust to Kevin Barry. I have to tune into his cadence, the vernacular, the lyricism. What sort of a world is this? For me it started way back with ‘City of Bohane’. But then once I’m in, I’m in; You get the air he’s playing and that’s it. There’s only a few writers I would say that about - there’s a musical quality to his writing, a sort of free flowing, crackling energy is the only way I can attempt to describe it.

And he can’t write a dull sentence. The words and phrases fizz, pinging about the page. Lots of vivid imagery, never overblown. Look at this for an opener:

On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buck-skin, 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?

His verse swung across the raw naked street and back again, and was musical, but he had no potatoes at all.

Western

I was surprised that this is his first western, because the setting and scenario suits his writing perfectly. A story of starcrossed lovers and revenge, a chase across a harsh winter terrain, a man in a long black coat in pursuit, moments of sporadic brutal violence, dark humour, and an oddball supporting cast.

And all the time this wonderful writing, poetic and raw, conjuring up this often brutal but sometimes tender tale. And I was never bored - there were moments of absurdity, and times when I had to re-read, just so I wouldn’t lose the flow of the writing.

Other passages of writing I just had to revisit for the sheer pleasure of it. And the pace varies - sometimes frenetic, sometimes measured. It never felt dense, but rather I was in too much of a rush with the story. And what a story.

Summary

I mentioned ‘City of Bohane’ earlier, but I’ve also enjoyed ‘Beatlebone’ ‘Night boat to Tangier’ and ‘Dark lies the island’ by the same author. But I think this one might just open up his work to a wider audience, or at least I hope so.

As you can maybe tell, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘A heart in Winter’. One of the finest Irish writers around creating an Irish western - a freewheeling, engrossing, fizzing, vivid, heartbreaker of a book.

Thank you to Canongate and Netgalley for the ARC. Published on 6/6/2024

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224 pages