The world fizzes with colour and tension in Kevin Barry's new novel

Canongate, £16.99

In the hardscrabble outback town of Butte, Montana in 1891, men shift for themselves as best they can to scrape a living and snatch a morsel of pleasure. Built on the coal trade, where exhausted miners – many of them Irish – spend their days and nights below ground, Butte is rife with violence, criminality, and despair. There’s precious little love in these parts, and most of that is paid for by the hour.

Tom O’Rourke is one of Butte’s most volatile citizens, a young Irishman with a talent for composing songs and writing letters on behalf of the illiterate. He has a bottomless capacity for drink, drugs and self-destructive activities. Added to which, his debts are mounting at the boarding house where he lives, whose Croatian landlady he disapproves of, since she sold her brother to traders from Vancouver. “The brother was soft-headed but even so.”

Most of the folk in Butte are as hard as the pickaxes that work the coalface. Tom, however, has a softness to him that becomes apparent when he sets eyes on the wife of the mine’s new boss, Captain Harrington. Working by day in a photographic studio, Tom assists in their wedding photos, and sees the awkwardness of a couple who were married within an hour of meeting. The Captain is not a bad man but, Barry writes, he “walked like a man with a pain he could tell you all about.”

Tom knows nothing of the captain’s penitential habit of scourging himself and praying on his knees before having sex, but he is instantly smitten by his blue-eyed wife, Polly Gillespie. Soon it’s clear she feels the same, and they decide to abscond together. Polly, who has endured a chequered past, is both courageous and resourceful. She is the brains of the pair, but while she recognises her lover’s inadequacies she loves him all the same, and her wildness of spirit matches his.  

And so they light out for California, a long coastwards journey on a single horse. They have only a few hours’ head start on those in pursuit, whose mission is to return Polly to her husband, and bring Tom back to be hanged: not for stealing another man’s wife but because, before setting off, he stole his landlady’s money and burned down the house.

Barry lyrically evokes the fear and the rapture of their flight through the Montana woods and mountains, with winter as well as pursuers on their tail. His is a lush, theatrical, unmistakably and occasionally parodically Irish style, his descriptions poetic and memorable: “a new drift of snow was falling on the uptown like a dirty white mood” or, as the pair ride for hours on end: “the hatchwork of the trees rolled by as a diorama and caused a soft hypnosis that was helpful”.  There’s a visual immediacy to his lines that lifts the novel from the realms of the written to the scenic, as if it’s passing your eyes on a screen not a page.

Although the linguistic flourishes and the intensity of his vision can at times be wearying, The Heart in Winter is a potent winter landscape in the same vein as Breughel’s The Hunters in the Snow. And – since those hunters were returning empty-handed – it is equally bleak.

Born criminals, with an instinct for lying, cheating and taking care of themselves, Tom and Polly are not so much Bonnie & Clyde as a cut-price Romeo and Juliet. Innocents, of a sort, they risk being overwhelmed by forces greater than them. “Death hovered close by the lovers always. It was around them like a charge in the air…”

Those forces come in the shape of a threesome of Cornmen, hired to bring them back. The caricatured nastiness of this trio complements the squalor of Butte and the flea-bitten towns the couple pass through, creating a scenario akin to an episode of the unremittingly seedy and brutal Deadwood. Indeed, the town of Deadwood is mentioned in passing.

READ MORE

John Burnside won’t be forgotten. He lives on in his poetry and novels

Author tackles notion that Scotland's bothies are attracting the 'wrong sort'

In this his fourth novel, the prize-winning Barry’s focus is similar to that in his last, Night Boat to Tangier. That was set in the modern day, an unvarnished if darkly funny depiction of a pair of Irish gangsters, and the torment crime brings for all those in its orbit.  

Here, in a novel written as confidently as if he inhabited the 19th-century frontier in a previous life, Barry’s tone veers between sentiment – but never sentimentality – and world weariness, between the danger of daring to hope for something better, and the ineluctable fate that awaits those who break the rules yet still believe they can outwit the poor odds they were born with.

 “Sometimes their laughter can be heard on the air of that place still,” he writes, of a cabin in the woods where the pair take refuge. From the start, The Heart in Winter has a mythic, fairytale atmosphere, Barry’s picaresque characters so hyper-vivid they could come from the pages of Hans Christian Andersen. The merest two-bit player is accorded a close-up portrait: “He was covered in the small bites as will afflict a ginger-complected man in the out country. His was a pale skin mottled and pecked looking.”

Everything is given its due, creating a world that fizzes with colour and tension. In Barry’s telling, the physical is also the metaphysical, which is what makes this tale so haunting. The fervour of his language, his acuteness of perception and observation ignite the book, while his understanding of human nature, especially when flawed, makes it crackle with evil potential. Terror walks hand in hand with black humour, a pairing that makes the horror, when it arrives, doubly shocking.

Not that this is a voyeuristically violent book. The worst of the cruelty it depicts is to people’s minds. The best of it is one man’s attempt to be better and braver than he could ever have imagined. Tom O’Rourke has the distinction, found in only a few literary characters, of finding his reason for living just as his chances of surviving look painfully slim.