The Heart of Winter
By Kevin Barry
Doubleday Publishing
ISBN 9780385550598
2024
243 pp
Butte, Montana in the early fall of 1891 is the setting for Kevin Barry’s latest novel, his fourth. His most recent one was Night Boat to Tangier. During the mining boom in the 1860s and 70s, the city saw a large influx of immigrants, a large percentage of whom were from Ireland and China. The Irish population in Butte was made up mainly of descendants of people from counties Cork, Kerry, Donegal, Mayo, Cavan, and Wexford.
The hero of Barry’s new novel is a dope-fiend Irishman, Tom Rourke, who works as an assistant for the photographer to earn drink money and writes letters for illiterate men seeking brides from the east. His spare time is spent haunting brothels and stacking up debt through his opium habit.
As the book begins, Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium at 4 am. He’s no horseman, yet the animal calls to him as if from some fore-dome future.
The second encounter is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington. Newly married but already bored with him “kissing and pecking at her like a nervous old hen,” which doesn’t promise much sexually, but “at least it was quick when it happened.” Soon she is ripe for a Rourke-shaped adventure, and they are quickly in bed together.
Tom and Polly hatch a plan involving arson, theft of a chunk of change from the hotel where Tom was living, and escape out west, where the main action of the story gets underway. Their destination is San Francisco, but they encounter a sequence of misfits along the way, including a bounty hunter employed by her husband to bring them back to Butte.
The book takes on a farcical yet romantic character as Tom and Polly follow a doomed love affair westward. The denouement may disappoint, but overall, it is Kevin Barry at his finest, with his sentences often long and flowing, yet sharply angled. The Heart in Winter is a TOP SHELF read.
● Terrence Kenneally is an attorney and owner of the Kenneally Law Firm in Rocky River, Ohio. He earned his Irish Studies degree from John Carroll University and teaches Irish history and literature at Elyria Catholic High School.
