Review by New York Times Review
SOME OF THE very best fiction is spun from a single filament of fact woven tightly - or loosely, if necessary - in and out of an asymmetrical framework of empathy, imagination and sheer audacity. Michael Ondaatje's "Coming Through Slaughter" (about the early jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden) and Nick Tosches' "In the Hand of Dante" (about, among other things, the writing of "The Divine Comedy") come to mind, both masterly literary extrapolations. The fact at the core of Kevin Barry's second novel, "Beatlebone," is that in 1967, John Lennon purchased an uninhabited island off the west coast of Ireland which, although he set foot there on less than a handful of occasions, he owned until the day he died. The conceit is that in 1978, two years before his murder in New York City, he traveled there alone on a walkabout of sorts. As Barry's yarn opens, the fictional Lennon is en route to his hotel, slumped in the back seat of a Mercedes piloted by a driver/fixer/shape-shifter called Cornelius O'Grady. Cornelius speaks in "a very smooth timbre, deep and trustworthy like a newscaster." He assesses his famous passenger in the rearview mirror. "You've the look of a poor fella who's caught up in himself," he says. "What's it's on your mind?" Somewhat moodily, John replies, "I just want to get to my island." Three days alone on his island is all John is after. Three days to scream (as in primal), and though he "likes this driver," it's solitude he's seeking. He bails out of the Mercedes at the edge of town and walks the rest of the way to his hotel. Phone calls are made. It's all been arranged. He sleeps almost not at all in a chair. When morning finally comes, who but the very same Cornelius O'Grady comes to collect him, with the news that half the newspaper reporters in Dublin are "piling onto the Westport train" to catch a glimpse of Lennon. "All I want," John repeats, "is to get to my island." Cornelius: "Which is it is yours?" John: "It's called Dorinish." Cornelius: "You'd say it Durn-ish." But knowing how to pronounce the name of a place doesn't bring the destination any closer. The unlikely pair embark on a series of diversionary side trips - ostensibly to throw the ever-encroaching "pressmen" off the former Beatle's trail, but the reader might catch him- or herself wondering whether Cornelius, a character possessed of a kind of homespun flair for the dramatic, isn't tipping the paparazzi off himself. In any case, pressmen or no pressmen, sailing conditions are deemed to be less than ideal that morning and they take refuge in a ramshackle farmhouse at the dead end of a ragged road "in complete agreement with its sad hill." Cornelius: "The house was my father's before me. And you know he never so much as shaved in the house?" John:"Oh?" Cornelius: "He would have thought it dirty." While they wait out the weather and the media, a decidedly off-the-beaten-path tour of County Mayo ensues, with points of interest including: A remote, otherworldly pub called the Highwood, where they encounter, among other characters, a man with only one ear because a badger ate the other while he slept in a field. A sheer cliff, hundreds of feet above a rocky beach where, at Cornelius's insistence, John stands with his toes at the very edge, leaning hard into the wind while it holds him "perfectly" there. Cornelius: "Do you see the trick of it, John?" John: "I think so." Cornelius: "No fear." And, finally, once the pair cast off in a leaky boat on the dark waters of Clew Bay, an island - not his own, but familiar to John - where reside the remnants of a cult presided over by a man with "the look of an enormous forest hog" who goes by the name of Sweet Joe. John: "I've been here before." Cornelius: "We've all been here before, John." The next 76 pages read like a nightmare from which you find yourself wishing John would just wake up - but you can't put the book down, so you soldier on together. If you're looking for a good informational read about John Lennon, then my guess is you'll do better elsewhere. While it will be obvious to any hard-core fan (guilty!) that Barry knows as much about Lennon's life as most of his biographers, that's not what this book is about - it's far more ambitious. That's not to say that "Beatlebone" could have been written about just any rock star. Nor for that matter could it have been written by just any writer. Only a literary beast, a daredevil wholly convinced he was put on this planet to write, would ever or should ever attempt to cast a person as iconic as John Lennon as a character in a tale of his own invention. Kevin Barry, whose previous novel was the dystopian "City of Bohane," is that beast. The fictional Lennon in these pages is fashioned on a skeleton of what we know about the public Beatle and what we think we know about the very private man. When you read John's words you can hear the nasal scouse accent we remember from "A Hard Day's Night" propelling his banter with Cornelius and the low mumble of "Revolution 9" in the constant comments under his breath. But this story takes place in 1978, a period in which the real John Lennon was all but invisible to the world outside of the Dakota, and therefore the muscle and blood of the character are largely conjecture - purely gossip in the hands of the average hack, but Barry is no hack. The John we meet on a journey in the west of Ireland in search of his creative (if not his former) self is fully formed, fleshed out with our own hopes and dreams and, one would assume, those of the author, because real writers can only write about themselves. And real writer or not, the character of Cornelius O'Grady could only have been created by an Irishman. Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven't yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox - razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist's approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation. The continuing conversation between John and Cornelius is the narrative engine of the tale of the Irish odyssey in 1978, but other voices are employed, each with a specific function: self-conscious prose when John's alone and without the cover of Cornelius's glib counterpoint; flowing, haunting free verse when he succumbs to haunting memories of his youth in Liverpool and his ghostly imaginings of the courtship of his mother and father. And just when you think you've seen everything and that there's nothing else the beast can unleash on his unsuspecting reader, he unveils a literary device this reader has never encountered before - a peek behind the curtain where the wizard wields the controls. ... Well, you'll have to read the book. And it works. It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast. You see the trick of it? No fear. 'You've the look of a poor fella who's caught up in himself,' a new friend tells John Lennon. STEVE EARLE is the author of the story collection "Doghouse Roses" and the novel "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." His latest album, recorded with the Dukes, is "Terraplane."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 29, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* All John Lennon wants is to be alone on the island he bought off the west coast of Ireland. That is the simple premise behind acclaimed Irish writer Barry's (Dark Lies the Island, 2013) singular new novel, in which he portrays the Lennon we know: acerbic, angry, confused, and, ultimately, lost. The only drama here is the remote chance that the Beatles-mad press may catch up with him; otherwise, the slim narrative consists of Lennon's painful ruminations and the dialogue between the singer and the people who are trying to get him to the elusive island of Dornish. Barry's Lennon displays a particular affection for a sad Beach Boys' song (Well, it's been building up inside of me / for oh, I don't know how long) as Lennon recalls his mother's premature death. Barry, a great poet of a novelist, devotes an entire chapter to this tale's backstory: how he succeeded in getting to Dornish. With echoes of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and The White Album, Barry has created an unusual novel, remarkable in structure as well as tone, that channels the contradictory nature of Lennon himself.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Irish novelist Barry puts the striking brogue of his native accent to good use in the audio edition of his new book. The fictional story line, blending real-life events in pop music history with inventive fantasy and psychological introspection, centers on the late rock icon John Lennon's 1978 visit to the remote island off the western coast of Ireland that he purchased a decade earlier. Barry shines in his vocal renderings of both Lennon and the other principal character, Cornelius O'Grady, a gruff no-nonsense driver for hire who possesses shape-shifting abilities that he displays while leading Lennon on a mystical journey. The secondary characters-an assorted cast of local burned-out hippies and salt-of-the-earth villagers-also shine in Barry's vocal rendering, and Lennon even befriends a dog that he names after Beach Boy Brian Wilson. But the surreal plot elements are hard to follow in the audio edition, and the street-wise Lennon and his equally colorful companion certainly utter a great deal of harsh language. A Doubleday hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In May 1978, John Lennon attempts an escape to Dorinish, a remote island he owns off the coast of Mayo in western Ireland, where he hopes to spend three days rekindling his creativity. Pursued by paparazzi, Lennon entrusts his person and privacy to Cornelius O'Grady, who guarantees to deliver the mercurial genius to his isolated outpost without interference from the press and fans. Instead, O'Grady chaperones Lennon on an elliptical anabasis through the magical Mayo countryside. The artist eventually makes it to Dorinish, but only after spending one evening in a haunted rural pub and another at a commune of primal-scream therapy adherents. Along the way, Lennon resolves to record "beatlebone," a sonic and musical expression of his Irish odyssey. -VERDICT The best moments in Barry's second novel (which follows the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning City of Bohane) happen when Lennon plays the straight man to the extraordinary O'Grady. An expository chapter describing Barry's own research journey for the book would have been a brilliant afterword but disrupts an otherwise extraordinary fiction that reads like a cross between Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea. [See Prepub Alert, 6/1/15.]-John G. -Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman © Copyright 2015. 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
A famous musician's 1978 pilgrimage to an island off the west coast of Ireland takes several detours, abetted by his memories and his minder, in this original, lyrical, genre-challenging work. Barry set his remarkable first novel, City of Bohane (2011), some 40 years in the future. Here, he looks back almost 40 years as he imagines a 37-year-old John Lennon hoping he can cure a creative block with a few days alone on the tiny island he owns. When he arrives in western Ireland, he learns that reporters are in pursuit, and he struggles to dodge them with the help of his driver/facilitator, Cornelius, who stashes him at one point in the strange Amethyst Hotel. There, John, a veteran of primal scream therapy, encounters people who believe screaming and ranting at one another is good for the soul and psyche. In the course of this miniodyssey, John's mind wends through his past, growing up in Liverpool, a girlfriend named Julia, and his Irish antecedents. He has brilliant, funny, almost musical dialogue with Cornelius. Then, after 200 pages, the author/narrator breaks in and explains how he has tried "to spring a story" from some historical facts. He also retraces what might have been John's steps, including poking through the now-ruined Amethyst. A photograph of the hotel printed on one page suggests W.G. Sebald and the porous membrane between fiction and reality. The closing section features more delightful dialogue, now between John and his recording engineer, before the musician breaks into a Molly Bloom-esque monologue, complete with a lilting last line about "a sadness" in his mother's voice "that tells me the way that time moves and summer soon across the trees will spin its green strands." Nothing at all like Barry's award-winning debut novel, this may be a risky follow-up, but it's intriguing at every turn, and Barry's prose can be as mesmerizing as some of his hero's songs. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
