The Heart in Winter: A Novel

“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”.

Features:

• Star-crossed lovers trying to escape their past lives through the American wilderness
• An Irish style Western taking place in 1891
• Beautiful story that can also be a bit raunchy and funny
• Poetic prose that utilizes a strong dialect

To Tom Rourke, Polly Gillespie is more lovely than any poem or ballad he could spin. Polly had never expected to find someone who could understand her like Tom. Will their clandestine romance lead to their salvation or their doom? This book is beautifully written and heartfelt at times, but it does not take itself too seriously. Though a Western at heart, it takes place just after ‘westward expansion’ and provides a very different view of this time period. There’s definitely a strong dialect to the prose being used and it might take a while for some readers to adjust to it. Even though this book never quite spoke to me personally, I think it is well written and would be thoroughly enjoyable to the right audience.

A beautiful romp through the wilderness

With few prospects left to her, Polly could do worse than mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. Though stuck in the small copper mining town of Butte, Montana with a husband that seems to love God more than her, she has everything she needs except more interesting company. However, when she is with town degenerate Tom Rourke, none of that seems to matter. Soon, they find themselves on a stolen horse on the way to San Francisco where they can disappear and start a new life together. But their pursuers are hot on their trail and the journey to safety will be more than they bargained for.

Though it can take a little bit of time to get into, this book is beautifully written. The descriptions aren’t just evocative, they also feel very unique and appropriate for the characters. Barry definitely manages to capture both the beauty and harshness of the landscape Polly and Tom have to traverse. As clunky and crude as the characters’ actions and decisions are, they are also well realized. There is very little that is ‘warm’ and/or ‘glorifying’ in the way that a lot of other literary novels can be, but it is uniquely beautiful all the same.

A boggling misadventure that edges on ridiculous

Even though I think this story is very well written and likely accomplishes what the author wanted, it really wasn’t for me. It is hard for me to figure out exactly why, but I think it comes down to simply wanting more from these characters. I know that some of the intended humor comes from the horrible and impulsive decisions the characters make. However, some of these (big and small) seem a little too ridiculous. Both characters have had to be clever and contain a certain amount of knowledge in order to make it this far in the time/place they live in. Yet there are many times where the characters seem lacking in ways that feel inconsistent with who they are and it makes some of the resulting situations annoying rather than tense or humorous. Sometimes, it even made it hard to enjoy the clever banter. This definitely might just be a me problem, but it is what it is.

EDIT: As others have said, there's a publishing defect in the hardback books. Pages 182-214 are missing, replaced by an earlier chapter. I'd wait for the paperback! Here's my review: Sometimes Kevin Barry hits his mark squarely (like City of Bohane), sometimes it seems like he's just kind of screwing around, though hilariously. This time I think he was just screwing around. He's extremely funny, his language is a hoot in the highest Irish style, I'll read everything he writes, but this one doesn't add up to very much. It's set in the American west but could still be Ireland (characters are all Irish, except for the Cornish, and they travel by horse in deepest snow but that's the only American giveaway, really). Everything's broken up into small paragraph-type chapters, occasionally a few pages long if you're lucky. I still find him hilarious. I often laugh out loud at his sheer audacity with words. Don't ever look for a real story in Barry's funny exercises, though.

Barry is a superb writer, no doubt, but reading this novel was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters rather than the NBA; a little less showmanship and more substance would have helped greatly. Barry devotes much of his time to impressing the reader with the depths of his main characters’ despair, ennui, angst, but yet I never felt I had a solid connection to either. The plot is fine as far as it goes but, in the end, not compelling. Barry was definitely on to an intriguing journey here but I’m still not sure exactly where he arrived.

Word-for-word as great as all his writing...but the plot loses him here half-way through and never recovers ...the Butte mining town atmosphere is well-drawn...a pioneer fight for survival by all...the characters have knife-sharp, blood-drawing dialogue...but the revenge-story meanders...the plot loses momentum....and the characters drift out of focus...still recommended b/c nobody writes like Kevin Barry...NOBODY.