Kevin Barry, the brilliant Irish writer – winner of the IMPAC Award for City of Bohane and the Goldsmiths Prize for Beatlebone – is fascinated, at times to the exclusion of anything else, with the attributes or properties of place. In his story “Wistful England,” from the collection Dark Lies the Island, the narrator says that Leytonstone seems like somewhere that “a dark turn might occur”. In “Beer Trip to Llandudno”, we’re told that “Birkenhead shimmered across the water. Which wasn’t like Birkenhead.” But despite the mild occultist undertones, the emphasis is always sensory or emotional-anthropocentric, not anthropomorphic. Barry writes about how places seem to people (either “male” or “female”), how they reflect on people (“someone sees you out walking a hill and you’re a fucking eejit”), what they connote for people (“a haven” or “a regular shithole”), and, perhaps most of all, how they form people. “It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year,” we read in “Fjord of Killary”, “and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.”
But a setting isn’t just a subject for description and a tool of characterisation. It’s also a narrative motor, the site of temporal processes. To introduce a place, at least as Barry does it, is to introduce a lot of other things as well. On the sparsely printed opening page of his third novel – the vivid but wayward Night Boat to Tangier, longlisted for this year’s Booker prize – we learn the surroundings (the “old Spanish port of Algeciras”), the quality of light (“dank”) in which a pair of “sombre” Irishmen are making their familiar “gestures of long-sufferance and woe”, as well as how this environment strikes the narrator: “as awful a place as you could muster”, with “a haunted air, a sinister feeling” redolent of tired bodies and “dread”. We also learn the year (2018), the month (October), the time of day (night), while the mention of “frayed posters – the missing” points towards a plot.
Content from our partners
