4 Stars
This book begins in October of 1891 in Butte, Montana. Tom Rourke, addicted to a life of alcohol, opium, and debauchery, meets Polly Gillespie who has just arrived and been married to a mine captain. It’s love at first sight for Tom, and Polly quickly succumbs to his roguish charm. Soon the two head west with stolen money and a stolen horse, their escape resulting in a pursuit by hired hit men.
This is, at least in part, a love story. It’s a forbidden love but one Tom and Polly believe is their fate, giving them no choice but to fall in love. Priding himself on being something of a clairvoyant, Tom “senses the approach of a dangerous fate” just before he first meets Polly. I found myself hoping that theirs was not a star-crossed love and that they would be given a chance to be together because, though surrounded by danger and violence, there is no doubt of the tenderness and passion that exists between them. When a situation arises that puts Polly in danger, Tom risks his life, feeling “He had never had a task so sharply defined in his life before, never this weight of purpose, not this fury of intent.”
The book excels at depicting the lives of immigrants working in the silver and copper mines: “they worked until death the pits.” They came to the Promised Land but “Those who had been dispossessed would forever remain so – this was the golden promise of the Republic.” One immigrant says, “In a country like this . . . all they give you is fairy tales. . . . They’ll tell you that you can be happy. That it’s your right and destiny. . . . Now that’s a bunch of horseshit.”
One of the book’s messages is that survival may mean forgetting the past. We learn little about Tom and Polly’s lives before their arrival in Butte. Even with each other they are circumspect: Tom “said little of the time before he came to Butte or where he had come from” and “She was blurry about the details of things” and both sense they should not press for more information. Looking back may result in being “eaten whole and alive by the past” so it’s best to avoid falling “into the drag of the past like the drag of a river because it is so powerful it can take you down.” And of course one’s memories cannot always be trusted: “the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain . . . The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.”
Westerns are not my genres of choice, but this one is worth reading for the language alone. There is an energy to Barry’s unrestrained language that jumps off the page. Here’s a description of the effects of drinking tequila: “They were neither of them used to Mexican drinking but intrigued by it all the same – its sweet congress and carnival air – despite the trepanation-like skull pain the colourless spirit had the pronounced tendency to leave in it wake.” A winter morning comes up “corpse-grey and ominous. Winter by now was truly the sour landlord of the forest.” The vivid imagery continues: “the stumps of ancient trees showed like broken teeth” and “a dank hallow that felt like an alcove for the laying out of the dead” and “the funereal odour of juniper as in a church incense.” There are also run-on sentences that lack commas and some stream-of-consciousness passages: “in a shotgun shack somewhere in the Idaho Territory getting fed up like a vealcalf by a toothlackin Cornish gunsman of extreme mental dubiety and the wind is pickin up outside and offerin its slow yearnsome tales – go sell ‘em somewhere else, fucker, I’m stocked – and you’re waitin on your sworn lover.” There’s more than tongue-in-cheek humour in the reference to “writing men with a penchant for the high style.”
There is a lot of humour. We’re introduced to Tom as he is engaged in writing matrimonial proposals for “wretched cases . . . The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night – they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of a page. Discretion, imagination and the careful edit were all that was required.” Then there are the various characters that Tom and Polly encounter during their travels, among the first being two Métis men enjoying hallucinogenic mushrooms and a man of the cloth imbibing large amounts of tequila.
The book reminded me of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, but I enjoyed this one much more. Its memorable characters, humour, vivid imagery, and poetic language make for an engrossing, entertaining read. There’s reference to a newspaper article entitled, “The Twelve Rules of Writing Western Adventures” which Tom studies “in grave and scholastic silence” before commenting sourly “There’s fucken twelve of ‘em?” If such rules exist, Kevin Barry has mastered them all.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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