By PETE HAMILL
Published: March 29, 2012
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"City of Bohane," the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy.
CITY OF BOHANE
By Kevin Barry
277 pp. Graywolf Press. $25.
Hugh O'Conor
Kevin Barry
The form resembles an Icelandic saga welded to a ballad of the American West, although the location is in a place somewhere in Ireland, around the year 2053. In prose that is both dense and flowing, Barry takes us on a roaring journey, among human beings who are trapped in life its own damned self. Nostalgiagrips many of them, even when they slash angrily at sentimentality. None of it is real, yet all of it feels true. This powerful, exuberant fiction is as true as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner and, in a different way, even the Broadway of Damon Runyon. Those places were not real. The stories remain true.
The binding story here is about love. Two men, one woman, a shared place. Bohane itself is separated by class, tribe, vision. One of the men is Logan Hartnett, who runs the Fancy, the most fearsome gang in the city. He's also called the Albino or the Long Fella (though not because he writes poetry, which he doesn't) or simply Mr. H. The obscure, nameless, occasional narrator points out one detail: "Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalized graveyard but we all have our crosses."
Logan is married to a woman now 43, tall, with a touch of Iberian beauty, made oddly more seductive by a cocked eye. Her name is Macu, from Immaculata. She and Logan are childless. They live in a "manse" in a comparatively well-off neighborhood, not far from the hotel that houses Logan's mother, a manipulative schemer who, as she nears 90, is still called "Girly." She is great nasty fun.
The other man is Gant Broderick. He's powerfully built in a movie macho style, and was once called "the big unit" by some residents of Bohane. We meet him in the second chapter, riding into the scary city on the El train. This is where the Western ballad usually begins. Gant is heading for the crime-drowned Bohane district called Smoketown, where he had once been boss. Boss of shebeens (Irish speakeasies), "hoor stables," joints that sold hemp and other drugs through the sleepless nights. But now he has been away for 25 years. And still exudes physical strength. "He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks," Barry writes.
But Gant is struggling with his emotions. He is, after all, riding into his own past. "The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled." He is also very happy to be home, hearing familiar slangy accents, the cawing of sea gulls, classical music playing in tender counterpoint from a kiosk, while inhaling the stink of decayed blood from a riverside slaughterhouse. This prodigal son knows where he is. One sentence sets up most of the rest of the novel: "He looked for her in every woman he passed, in every girl."
Gant is looking for Macu, the girl he lost (along with his street power) to Logan. He hopes it is not too late to repair what happened when they were both a quarter of a century younger. Ludicrous. But for almost everybody in this novel, such hopes are just other types of drugs. Even the younger characters are afflicted with the presence of the "lost time" in Bohane, the collective memory of a period without dates, when something calamitous happened that is never spelled out.
Then again, in this Irish novel Ireland isn't spelled out either. Bohane's main street is named for the long-dominant Irish political leader Eamon De Valera. Three housing projects are named for Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. The residents never mention any of them. Each project is ruled by a separate gang that bears the name of one of the great poets. In Bohane, there are no computers, no cellphones, no digital cameras (a photographer for the town's newspaper uses "a medieval Leica"). The "lost time" never refers either to the rise, or the fall, of the Celtic Tiger. All of the rest of Ireland is offstage. And Bohane lives an insular saga of recurring violence. The individuals seem trapped by biography, not by history. There are no texts of "the lost time," only songs. Calypso, the blues, scraps of rock. Heard at the midnight hour in bordellos and shebeens. No rousing Irish rebel songs. No tricolor flags.
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