The Heart in Winter: A NovelKindle

“A western, with Irish accents,” is how Kevin Barry described his new novel, “The Heart in Winter.” In tone and setting, you can think the HBO series “Deadwood,” although told from a pair of young lovers' hearts rather than saloon owners or lawmen. This is 1891 wild west Butte, Montana, a town where 10,000 men have immigrated from Cork, Ireland to find work in the copper mines. Tough and gritty times.

A rough young degenerate poet, Tom Rourke, is spending his days drenched in alcohol and opium, unsure whether to leave town or just end things altogether. He is earning a few bucks assisting a photographer when a newly married couple come in for a portrait. Tom is floored by the bride, Polly Gillespie, and the world pinwheeled.

“...she got a portrait done and that boy was looking at her so hard it was like he just discovered eyes.”

Instantly in love, there is nothing to do but cast their fate to the wind. Tom robs a brothel, sets fire to it to cover his tracks, and the two of them journey headlong into Montana’s wilderness with only the vaguest of notions how to survive a trek to San Francisco.

Kevin Barry writes like no one else. Paragraphs may be pages long, but it flows smoothly as the poetry, the dialogue, and the humor are just the slightest bit off expectations– it all blends together and creates an odd but authentic world. Tom and Polly are unforgettable characters, too– naive lovers who have gone all in– shrugging off the knowledge that there will probably be consequences to their blind faith. They speak of death often– more of its inevitability than its threat.

I mentioned the TV series Deadwood. That is probably a good barometer if you are unsure if this is your type of reading. The violence, raw humor, and multisyllabic array of curse words will be triggers to some. “Heart in Winter” also shares many of that show’s treasures, as well.

While approaching this book with some optimism, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Ready for a western adventure, I was enchanted by the prose and the world Kevin Barry conjured. I was probably most impressed with how Tom Rourke began as such an unlikeable stain, only to develop into such a fascinating character over the course of time.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Doubleday Books for the ARC of The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry.

Wow, what a cover! Minimalist and eye-catching - it wasn't until after I read the synopsis that I recognized Barry for Night Boat to Tangier which I read a few years back.

It took me about 10-15 minutes of reading to catch on to Barry's prose in The Heart in Winter - something I also remember having to with Night Boat to Tangier - his writing style is very immersive to the topic and it drops you right into a location where the reader has to quickly right themselves to understand the layered meaning of the story. Once into the second chapter focused from Polly's perspective everything felt aligned prose wise. If anyone briefly struggles, stick with it!

Tom Rourke, one of our main characters, writes letters for the men of Butte to help them bring women to the west to marry. One of the women Tom writes to is Polly Gillespie, and within 48hours of her arriving to Butte and marrying the mining captain Long Anthony Harrington, she and Tom begin an emotional and physical affair. Within a few weeks they have made a slapdash plan to steal money and a horse while creating a town-wide distraction to sneak away to the west. When Harrington realizes what has happened, he hires a gang of men to bring Polly back to him. This is where the action begins and we ride along with perspectives from Tom, Polly, and the other players to the end.

Barry's books are concise but every single word and sentence lends to the story. Because of this he has a depth of character building and plot development that flows quickly, but it never feels forced or accidental. We know from the first five pages what a mess Tom Rourke is - suicidal, heavy drinker, opium user, pays for sex, mostly broke, a bit of an insomniac, poet/writer of love letters, etc. In the town he is an accepted scamp - it is recognized he is incapable of being a miner and that he doesn't pay his debts and he avoids the other Irishmen of the town and he is more or less nonviolent. Polly is not just a woman looking for a husband, she's looking to escape her past and recognizing that a woman of 32 has few options in the world - pretending to be younger and virginal for the captain is a simple escape. Together Tom and Polly are a lovely disaster trying their best to make it in the wild west - even knowing their flaws, it's still so easy to root for them.

The backdrop of the west in this time period is well displayed and thought out. The array of cultures and the efforts toward national expansion in the effort to achieve manifest destiny and the American dream highlight the true struggle of finding a new home and being treated equally as fellow townsfolk/fortune seekers/survivors.

The story also contains some of the pivotal elements of westerns - the wilderness, the settlers, outlaws, bounty hunters, and questions or morality and justice - all told from a more nuanced perspective. It is a fine addition to the genre.

Especially in the first 100 pages Barry displays an uncanny ability to surprise with a spot-on sentence of real, the last thing you were expecting, but perfect, inevitable, once you've seen it. By all rights, the story should be zany, but it's real people, doing and saying real things. It reminds me of Denis Johnson.

But, after successfully matching Hansel with Gretel, and motivating them into the Gingerbread House, Barry foregoes the bother of “plot” in favor of more and more poetic philosophical ambience. It’s no longer real people doing real things; developments are unmotivated, implausible, beyond Deus ex Machina-- more like A Thousand and One Nights. The cutesy-quaint bog Irish gets a bit precious in the processing.

Nonetheless, it’s a quick read, and memorable enough. What Graham Greene would call an "entertainment”.