Review by New York Times Review
"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. 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. Nostalgia grips 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 welloff 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. Instead, as in most sagas from Iceland to the O.K. Corral, transitions of power come through violence. Barry presents the contending forces with gathering momentum. The most important figure is the tough, intelligent daughter of some Chinese migrants. Her name is Jenni Ching. Even when her mother killed herself in the stinking black waters of the Bohane river, she stayed. Logan tries to hold off what seems to be coming, even agreeing to a formalized feud, written and declared on paper. The infantry on one side are made up of "pikeys," itinerants, outcasts, fashioning their own mores and their own language. The potential power base is expanding. And Jenni Ching can count. BUT Barry doesn't tell his tale in the style of Edward Gibbon. For me, he evokes the graphic language of certain master comic book artists from Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman all the way to Frank Miller, of "Sin City." That style is noirish: cinematic long shots, medium shots, close-ups, played against the deep, rich blacks of ominous night. Like a great movie director, Barry always pays careful attention to the way his characters dress. He knows that clothes also speak. They brag, they seduce, they persuade. Clothes suggest character. Even shoes - often in Bohane equipped with clicking metal taps - can add to their message. And clothes can also be a form of armor. In my own postwar adolescence in poor parts of Brooklyn (and in distant Los Angeles), the zoot suit, with its pegged pants and shoulder pads, was like a personal billboard: don't mess with me. Bohane is no different. On a local level, too, a menacing style can lead to control. Among Barry's characters, Logan knows this well. So does Jenni Ching. Reading this novel, with all of its violence, I also felt a kind of joy exuding from its author. The joy of finding, and sustaining, a voice. The joy of being surprised by his own inventions. I suspect that any reader, including the Irish, will sense that joy. It's about freedom. A warning: the freedom includes the use of much language usually described as "bad." But we have not read this book before. It is not a rehash, not assembled from a kit. In its hurtling prose, we understand again that the bad can be beautiful too. But part of Barry's triumph may be extra-literary. He preaches no sermons, embraces no cleansing delusions. In his Bohane, there are no saints, very few cleareyed witnesses, and many, many sinners. They make no art or beauty. But they live. Their major consolations are familiar to the human species: death, and rolling peals of dark laughter. For almost everybody in Kevin Barry's novel, hopes of reclaiming the past are just other forms of drugs. Pete Hamill is the author of 11 novels. The most recent is "Tabloid City."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What strange and dangerous glamor first-time novelist Barry of Dublin conjures on the rough streets of the city of Bohane, which hulks and shudders on the banks of a poisoned river bounded by a vast patchwork of bogs called the Big Nothin'. It takes a few pages to acclimate to the vivid argot of this past-its-glory city, but soon its seductive music lures you forward as you try to suss out the tricky relationships among its scheming characters. Out walking alone late at night, the elegantly attired Logan, or Long Fella, head of the gang Hartnett Fancy, breathes in the sweet badness of Bohane, a scent that permeates this ravishing carnival of obsession and betrayal, intoxication and crime, blood oaths, power grabs, and gang warfare. When Logan's old rival, the Gant, dares to return, everyone in Bohane braces for a showdown. With escalating suspense and wonder, we watch Logan's dapper young warriors engage in gory action; puzzle over secretive Girly, Logan's bedridden old mum; and cautiously admire Jenni Ching, sleek and deadly in sprayed-on vinyl. Although Barry has set this bewitching, stylized noir pageant of underworld dynastic upheaval in the grim near-future, it has a timeless air, with spookily beautiful evocations of ancient Irish mythology and an elegiac sense of civilization's attenuation while the old, bred-in-the-bones urges are resurgent.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barry's debut novel, a near-future noir, takes readers on a walking tour of Bohane, an apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland's west coast. One of its seedier precincts, the Back Trace, is ruled by underworld boss Logan Hartnett of the Hartnett Fancy gang, who governs like an Irish Don Corleone. But the graying Hartnett finds his power threatened when his rival, the Gant Broderick, returns after a 25-year absence. Hartnett also has to cope with an upstart gang, the Cusacks, that wants to take over the Trace. To make matters worse, his wife, Macu, who is also the Gant's former lover, wants him to give up the life. And finally, tough Fancy girl Jenni Ching, a "saucy little ticket" with a "pack of feral teenage sluts at her beck 'n' call in the Bohane Trace," may be playing both ends against the middle. How Hartnett handles these various crises forms the dramatic core, but with so many literary influences running through it, the novel reads as if China Mieville and Irvine Welsh had collaborated to update Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Although this sort of future-shock noir is nothing new and the elliptical narrative peters out before it reaches its inconclusive climax, the author succeeds with a continual barrage of hybrid language reminiscent of Anthony Burgess at his A Clockwork Orange best. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Given Barry's reputation for audacious brilliance, the "virtuosic writing" in this much-tweeted, much-blogged-about futuristic Irish dystopia is no surprise. (LJ 11/1/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
There Are Little Kingdoms, 2007). The author goes for broke in constructing his fictional City of Bohane, a once-great city on the west coast of Ireland that has taken 40 years to fall into utter decay. The setting is a rich stew of ethnicities, loyalties, gangster cred, vices and technologically barren conflicts. Different provinces promise different pleasures: parallel streets in New Town, barely controlled chaos in the Back Trace, fetish parlors and shooting galleries in Smoketown, all behind the moat of the Big Nothin'. Pulling the strings on this criminality is Logan Hartnett, a gaunt, pale rake called "The Albino." Hartnett is beleaguered by harpy wife Immaculata and protected by a trio of young warriors: ambitious Wolfie Stanners, irrepressible Fucker Burke and razor-cool Jenni Ching, who works all sides with equal aplomb. A "welt of vengeance" threatens to jump off, after a Cusack of the Rises gets "Reefed" in Smoketown. Make sense? Much like the fiction of Irvine Welsh, the vernacular takes some acclimatization. Stirring the pot is the fact that Hartnett's mortal enemy, "The Gant Broderick," has sashayed back into town. "Halways pikey, halfways whiteman. Been gone outta the creation since back in the day. Was the dude used to have the runnins before the Long Fella. Use' t'do a line with the Long Fella's missus an' all, y'check?" explains Wolfie in his messy patois. The familiar gangland drama won't come as any great surprise, pulling in traces of pulp fiction, cop flicks and the grittier dystopian films into its gravity, but its style is breathlessly cool. Barry's addictive dialect and faultless confidence make this volatile novel a rare treat.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
