25 July 2024

Romance on the run in the Old West

Kevin Barry’s new novel The Heart in Winter sets passion against violence on the brutal American frontier.

Tom Rourke is not quite a drifter, not quite a fixture of Butte, Montana – but so it is for all of its inhabitants in 1891, the year Kevin Barry’s first historical novel is set. Originally from County Cork, Rourke has made his way across the Atlantic, across a whole continent, to this frontier city where he works as a photographer’s assistant, smokes dope, and in his spare time writes letters on behalf of lonely miners to persuade young ladies to come from the east and marry them. One such is Polly Gillespie, betrothed and swiftly married to one Captain Harrington of the Anaconda mine.

Barry, who won the International Dublin Literary Award for his first novel, City of Bohane, and the Goldsmiths Prize for his second, Beatlebone, draws on the true stories of the Irish in the American West for The Heart in Winter. The Anaconda mine was purchased in 1880 by an Irishman, Marcus Daly, and located just outside Butte: by 1895 it was the largest producer of copper in the world. The nationality of its owner drew tens of thousands of his countrymen to Montana – Barry’s fictional Rourke among them.

One day Tom Rourke is tasked with assisting in taking the wedding portrait of Harrington and his bride – a bride whom Rourke may have had a hand in sourcing. In that moment between Tom and Polly it is love at first sight, or at least love of a particular kind: “He spoke to her at the end and he was another Irish and a doper type and she had a dark feeling all at once like a cloud was passing over and suddenly everything was chilly and there was a real weight to it.”

Here is the run-on, blunt and luxurious music of Barry’s prose, a rich delight in this novel which makes a tragic love story from this encounter. Polly flees from her new husband – a “God-fearin type to a good extent” who will lash himself with a rope before climbing into bed with Polly – with Tom, lighting out through the wilderness with the intent of settling in San Francisco. But a furious Harrington sets three Cornishmen, rejoicing in the names of Jago Marrack, Kitto Pengelly and Caden Spargo to hunt them down: their fate is not one to spoil for the reader in this venturesome tale.

And a tale it is, one in a rich tradition that springs, not least, from the small screen. Barry himself has noted that some of the best long-form fiction can be seen on American television, at least of a certain order: “They’ve stolen so much from the way novels are structured, maybe it’s time novels started stealing something back,” he has said. Certainly, with its setting in the shadow of a mining boom and its eccentric cast, it calls to mind David Milch’s Deadwood, which ran for three seasons in the early years of this century. Polly’s duping of Harrington – he believes her to be an innocent maiden, and let’s just say she’s not – calls to mind Deadwood’s Joanie Stubbs’ (a resplendent Kim Dickens) infatuation with a young con artist (an early appearance by a striking Kristen Bell).

As in Deadwood, A Heart in Winter sets passion against violence, and considers how the soul survives in extremity. On the so-called American frontier – its original inhabitants effectively eradicated – immigrants hoped to escape their pasts but of course carried them along inside themselves. The sheriff set to organise the hunt for Rourke and Gillespie considers himself aggrieved by “the deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren”. “Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally on the way out, and sooner that than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm.”

Yet those niceties are beautifully drawn here by Barry, who captures this pair’s stolen romance with the grace of his words. “The hooktip of her nose was cold and blue as a berry as he kissed it… The edge of the forest here felt fated in the way of a final place and this thrilled her to an unholy degree.” For the duration of this sojourn with these lovers their brutal world is enveloping, and we are fated with them.