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In his third collection of short stories, Kevin Barry reveals himself to be quite the romantic. It’s a risky move for a writer who, from 2007’s There Are Little Kingdoms to last year’s Booker-longlisted novel Night Boat to Tangier, has built a fearsome reputation for quick, deadpan, darkly comic prose.
He acknowledges this peril from the off, with an epigraph quoting Jane Campion on the valour and dangers of “the romantic impulse”. In the stories of That Old Country Music, that troublesome impulse manifests in characters who are lovelorn, escapist or foolhardy; in the allure of death and a Wordsworthian return to nature; and, with a coy measure of self-deprecation, in the image of the writer himself, mindful of his own constructed anguish. In all its manifestations, however, Barry keeps his take on the romantic tethered to humour and to his remarkable rendering, without crass mimicry, of the dialect of the west of Ireland, where most of these stories are set.
Where there is a romantic impulse there will be excess of feeling, and Barry exploits the comedic opportunity exquisitely. In the opening story, “The Coast of Leitrim”, lonesome bachelor Seamus Ferris is amazed that a Polish waitress in the local café returns his affection. She moves into his cottage by the mountain, but Seamus “could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome.” As swept up in the fear of loss as he was in the first throes of love, he imagines scenarios of her “coughing blood in the sink one morning, and then the quick raging of her demise — an illness like a wild animal tearing through her — and the way she would die a bag of bones in his arms” — before simply sabotaging the relationship himself.
In “Deer Season”, after a brief but harmful affair with an older, impoverished stranger, a teenage girl reflects on the “long, thin, sombre man, in a soak of noble depression . . . perhaps already betrothed to a glamorous early death” and, when he is disgraced and driven away, wears a “cloak of widowly despair”. It’s ridiculous, but the shot of ridicule also delivers compassion.
Death takes centre stage in “Who’s-Dead McCarthy”, without the romantic overtures. Con McCarthy is Limerick’s “connoisseur of death”, always first to break morbid news, then watching out for the event itself: “If you idled anywhere by the river of an evening you might take the slow rake of Con McCarthy’s worried eye”. He’s one of several stock types that Barry plays with — most explicitly in “Ox Mountain Death Song”, wherein generations of poor thugs are pursued by an equally long line of drink-prone sergeants.
The Ireland in which Barry sets these stories is both the old and the new, and the latter could be anywhere: flat whites, refugee detention centres, russet fake tans. The old, though, is more revered — notwithstanding the occasional friendly gibe, for instance in “Old Stock”: “Here’s a very old joke — Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.”
In one of the more serious stories, “Saint Catherine of the Fields”, the narrator travels from Dublin to Connaught to research traditional music: “the usual loosening occurred as I crossed the Shannon river . . . a kind of receptivity”.
In the west, he finds his pain after a break-up still “had that shimmer
of bliss at its edges”. His translation of a song heard from a dying old man — a dark tale of a life ruined by misplaced love sung in “antique Connacht
Irish” — becomes a story within a story, harking back to such devices in the earliest romances.
Another serious tale, “Roma Kid”, inverts the trope of children lost in the woods — here, a young refugee flees the city to find, in deep countryside, sanctuary in the care of an elderly hermit. Escape also surfaces in “Extremadura (Until Night Falls)”, with a Roscommon man on a pilgrimage away from a broken heart: “At one time southerned was a very common word and southerning a practice. For the better of the lungs and so forth . . . I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.”
The writer appears from time to time — in “Old Stock”, the narrator lives under the lingering influence of a late uncle in Donegal: “This place could wreak fucking havoc on a man’s prose if you let it”, he writes, whereas back in Sligo (where Barry lives) “looking out at endless rain and reed fields, you are not inclined towards a curlicued or ornamental style”. He sounds close to his creator, locked in a battle to control his own romantic impulse.
That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, Canongate RRP£14.99, 192 pages
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