"The Irishmen look out blithely at the faces that pass by in a blur of the seven distractions -- love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death."
Kevin Barry has created an indelible, unforgettable duo with Maurice and Charlie, a pair of road-worn Irishmen who propel the story of "Night Boat to Tangier." Peppered with amazing Irish idioms, the book is lilting and melodic, drawing on the compelling tradition of Gaelic trad music.
This novel finds its rhythm during an achingly rendered scene of double suicide avoided, and is able to turn what could have been a bottle episode into a painstakingly detailed depiction of three parallel lives.
" ... What's the nature of the attraction? To this way of life ye've picked?
"It's freedom, she says.
"It's poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free."
The result is one of my favorite books of the year, a super-fast read that sucks you in without you fully realizing it. Amidst the jokes and the irony and the satire, Barry stops your heart with a passage seemingly from out of nowhere, a collection of sentiments that leaves you stunned and immovable.
This -- this is the gift of the bonafide writer.
"It was the image of Gulliver pinned to the earth, the skin stretched out in a thousand sharp pulls and tacked, his wife, his child, his mother, his dead father, the green corridor, his crimes and additions, his enemies and worse, his friends, his debtors, his sleepless nights, his violence, his jealousy, his hatred, his insane fucking lust, his wants, his eight empty houses, his victims, his unnameable fears and the hammering of his heart in the dark and all the danger that moved through the night and all of his ghosts and all that his ghosts demanded from him and the places that he had been to in his life and longed for again, and the great pools of silence in the bone hills above -- what lives inside those fucken hills? -- and the solitude that he so badly craved, and the peace he so needed, and the love he needed, and he was just a young man still, in essentials, he was really very young -- but, yes, he was pinned to the fucken earth all right."
While not a ton actually happens in the contemporary timeline of "Night Boat to Tangier," that's kind of the point. They say the past is always alive in Ireland, and that remains true in the world that Barry has lovingly and stunningly painted.
"She said nothing but he could see she was wondering what it would be like if they kissed.
"I think it could be quite nice, he said.
"And for the first time she smiled.
"How the fuck did you do that? she said.
"And he just kissed her."
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