There’s a kind of Irish writing that’s all about the myth of Ireland. Think—well, think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, of course. But it was around in light form back in Somerville and Ross’s 1899 Some Experiences of an Irish RM, and it has lasted well past the short-story writer’s Sean ó Faoláin’s death in 1991.
And there’s another kind of Irish writing, a different thing, which is all about the words. Supremely that’s Finnegans Wake, of course. Yeats was a wonder, a star come from County Sligo to ornament Irish literature, and all honor to him. But Joyce—Joyce is inescapable. He lies across Ireland like a bog from the Western Shores all the way to the Irish Sea, and every Irish writer has to cross him, one way or another. Flann O’Brien’s 1939 At Swim-Two-Birds is a good example of that word-obsessed Irish writing, and so, in its way, is City of Bohane, Kevin Barry’s first novel.
Down at Tommie’s bar, Barry writes, “Ceiling fans whirred noirishly against the night, and were stoical, somehow, like the old uncles of the place, all raspy and emphysemic.” Meanwhile the character Ol’ Boy struts across town, wearing “high-top boots expensively clicker’d with gold taps, a pair of hip-hugging jodhpur-style pants in a faded mauve tone, an amount of gold chains, a heavy mink coat to keep out the worst of the hardwind’s assaults and a goatskin beanie hat set pavee-style at the crown of his head.”
And in the midst of it all, a war is brewing in Bohane, with the gangs from the high-rises ready to sweep down on the central neighborhood of Smoketown. As the 17-year-old Jenni Ching tries to warn Logan Hartnett—the old leader of the Fancy, the gang that runs the city—”Cusacks gonna C o’ vengeance by ‘n’ by and if yer askin’ me, like? A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the Rises is the las’ thing Smoketown need.”
It’s great writing, all of it—but, then, City of Bohane pretty much has to be about the writing: the different voices the characters use, the narrator’s strangely distant observations. Good as the writing is, the plot is as conventional as a 1940s B-movie. The plot is a 1940s B-movie, as far as that goes: For all that City of Bohane is set in a mysterious Irish city in the year 2053, Barry uses the futuristic setting to throw Ireland back to 1940s America as Hollywood’s imagined it. No cellphones exist in 2053 Ireland. No computers. No cars, for that matter. The gangsters come into Smoketown and the Big Nothin’ by tram and train, and they write paper letters when they need to communicate to one another their insults and challenges. Ireland itself might as well not exist in the novel, although Barry plays that part of the narrative with a light hand and a delicate irony. De Valera, for example, is the main drag of the town, and gets its name from the Irish leader Eamon De Valera. The housing projects are named after the Irish poets Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney. But if the people of Bohane know the origin of those names, they never mention them. The tarmac path from the Heaney Highrises down to the De Valera road is as meaningless as the intersection of Main and First Street in a Hollywood gangster film.
As violent, too, as a gangster film. As the story opens, Logan Harnett has been in control of a gang known as the Harnett Fancy for 25 years. “The Long Fella,” as he’s sometimes known. Or “H” or “the Albino” or just “the ‘Bino”: The townsfolk have a wariness—a fear, perhaps, that naming calls—about actually speaking his name aloud, and they routinely refer to him with the kind of circumlocutions that older generations of the Irish would use for banshees and the dangerous Little Folk of the Daoine Sídhe. From Smoketown—all “hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons, and Chinese restaurants”—to the mazes of Back Trace, the Hartnett Fancy has prospered by running the most lucrative sections of crime-ridden Bohane. And all of it has surely been due to the leadership of Logan: tall and lanky and elaborately dressed.
In short order, reading City of Bohane, we meet the novel’s other characters. Logan’s wife, for instance: Macu, short for Immaculata, a Spanish semi-beauty with a cocked eye, now 43 years old, childless, and wondering what’s left of her life. And Logan’s mother, a monstrous manipulator and willful ruiner of lives from her perch (thanks to Logan’s money) in the honeymoon suite at the Bohane Arms hotel; perhaps everything one needs to know about her is contained in the fact that she’s almost ninety-year-old and still named “Girly.”
Meanwhile, Logan’s underemployed henchmen, the boys of the Fancy, sit obliviously in their cafés eating pumpkin seeds, while the young Jenni Ching and Wolfie Stanners try unsuccessfully to warn Logan—to warn anyone who will listen—that Bohane is about to explode, the new generation of gangsters from the high-rises unwilling to accept any longer the dominance of the Fancy. Ol’ Man Mannion, the elderly pawnbroker who seems to have a finger in every pie, has a sense of dread, as does the strange character of Sweet Baba Jay, a Christ-figure who watches everything in town but never intervenes.
As the story gathers steam, we learn that Logan is distracted from the future that ought to concern him, the rise of the young gangbangers, because he’s been called back to the past, with the arrival of Broderick—”the Gant”—his old enemy and rival for Macu, returning to Bohane for the first time in 25 years. The Cusack family, up in the high-rises, has put up for decades with Logan’s preeminence, but when one of their members is killed in Smoketown—”reefed,” as the Bohanians say—they swear “a welt o’ vengeance.” Jenni tries to head off a fight, but Logan won’t accept her advice. The return of the Gant has reminded of the old way of doing things, and he begins to hunger for a general bloodletting that will let off steam and ease the tensions of the city’s many long-lingering feuds.
And so the war comes. The Cusacks and the “Norries” come piling down from the highrises. Girly’s machinations issue in tragic results. The Sand-Pikeys from Big Nothin’ join in, promised a cut of Smoketown’s crime revenues. The Gant and the Long Fella head toward their showdown, Jenni ineffectually beats at the stone of catastrophe as it rolls toward town, and Sweet Baba Jay watches the inevitable end of the story begin to arrive.
Eyes Cusack, the leader of the high-rise gang, tries to explain how the death of a family member has upset everyone beyond the power of normal reconciliation to cure: “Me brud’s gone loolah on accoun’ and his missus gobbin’ hoss trankillisers like they’s penny sweets, y’check me?” Meanwhile, the narrator tries to explain what the dawn brings to Bohane: “Solstice broke and sent its pale light across the Big Nothin’ bogs. A half-woken stoat peeped scaredly from its lair in a drystone wall and a skinny old doe stood alert and watchful on a limestone outcrop.”
If you read for the sake of the writing—that kind of Irish writing that draws its power from the sheer brilliance of the words—then you have to love City of Bohane. Barry showed enormous promise with his 2007 story collection There Are Little Kingdoms (published in the United States in 2010), winning the Rooney prize for Irish Literature and rightly being dubbed by the Irish Times as “the most original writer to come out of this island in years.” And now with City of Bohane, he’s shown just how good he is, inventing not just a general new vernacular but refracting it like a rainbow into the different voices with which the different characters speak it. This is a Joycean level of language: playful and profound at the same time. Both unified and inflected. Fast as lightning and yet worth slow study.
If your interest, however, is in a new story—some deep novelistic account of the human condition and the manners and morals of the social order—then City of Bohane is not really worth your time. Watch Stuart Heisler’s 1941 film Among the Living or Richard Fleischer’s 1950 Armored Car Robbery. Robert Wise’s 1947 Born to Kill, for that matter, or John Huston’s 1950 The Asphalt Jungle. You’ll get the same noir feeling, in the authentic era instead of a mythical future, and it won’t take as long as reading City of Bohane.
In other words, the gloss of his writing is as shiny as new shellac, but it is not enough. When Kevin Barry finds a genuine topic to write about at novel length, a full novel’s story to tell that isn’t borrowed wholesale from B-movies, he is going to prove the best Irish writer since William Trevor. Until then, we have to survive with just City of Bohane.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills of South Dakota and author most recently of The Christmas Plains, coming from Image/Random House in October 2012.
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