Night Boat to Tangier

Night boats to Tangier come and go as two old buddies, Irish hard men who've shared lifetimes of law-breaking adventures and heart-breaking romances, wait at a Spanish seaport hoping one's estranged daughter will arrive on a ferry from Tangier -- or show up to catch a boat going the other way. The tumble of words spilling from the mouths and minds of the pair are grand and beautiful on their own; fortunately for readers wondering if there's a story here, there is! It's a sordid tale, it seems, of booze, heroin, crime and, at the center of it, a romance that is so fine that we know, because these two aging crooks are, after all, Irish literary creations, it is doomed by excess and jealousy and alcohol and drugs and worse! Those evils can result in no good for the two old buddies. They are great compadres and great rivals, too!

Because the two men are waiting at the ferry terminal for a daughter who seems to be one of a horde of dreadlocked young people swarming indolently across the Spanish landscape, because they are waiting for Dilly, the 23-year-old daughter of one of the men, this novel has been compared with Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." I think it is richer, more subtle, more wonderful!

Does Dilly show up? Find the answer to that question is just one of the reasons to read this beautiful piece of prose!

Two Irishmen, aged out of the drug trade, wait in a Spanish ferry terminal anticipating this is the night they will find Dilly, the daughter of one of these shipwrecked souls. She's coming in from Tangier. Or going to. They haven't seen her in three years.

Their dialogue across 24 hours of waiting and flashbacks to their years of want, fulfillment, addictions, loyalty, betrayal, vengeance, business-like violence and atonement is dark, lush, cryptic and revealing. Their youth is the father of their first years of old age.

It's funny. It's gritty. It's one of the top reads of 2019 for me.

I read Kevin Barry's "City Of Bohane" on my kindle and knew that future Barry books would be hardback. My wife and I loved it. If you're at all like me, you also read the negative reviews to see why people don't like a book.

Some people don't like the fact that Mr. Barry does not use quote marks and they felt lost and jumbled between dialog and description. It's true, he does not use quote marks; neither does Cormac McCarthy. If you pay attention to what you're reading, it's easy to tell the difference between dialog and not dialog. If you are a stickler for quote marks, this book will not be pleasant read.

Some people felt that the two main male characters were so reprehensible that they could not like them and so could not like the book, some to the point that they could not finish the book. If that is one of your criteria, you may not like this book. I, on the other hand, like Dostoyevsky and I cannot think of a major character in any of his novels that I would describe as pleasant.

One person described the people in the book as misogynistic. Knowing that the main characters were part of the criminal class in the British Isles, I had a suspicion what the issue was before I read the book. Now that I've read it, I'm certain: it's the use of the dreaded "C" word. It is used 8 or 9 times . Some people in the UK and Ireland use the C word in largely the same way Americans use the the 7 letter slang term for anus and most of the characters in this book fall into that group of people. For what it's worth all of the female characters in this book are stronger people than the two main protagonists. If the use of the C word in dialog will upset you, this book is not for you.

I don't mind lack of quote marks, unpleasant main characters, or the use of the C word. I loved the writing, plot (yes, there is one) , and even the characters. I plan to read it it again at least twice.

This is another book group read. I wasn’t smitten with this book. About a fourth of the way through, I found myself wondering why I was reading about these awful people. Still, it was so lovingly recommended that I insisted on finishing it so I could decide what I thought of it.

Now that I’ve finished it, I find myself asking what was this book about? On one level it’s about the friendship between these two men, Charlie and Maurice, from this youth through their adult years. They did their best to destroy their friendship and their lives.

The mystery in all of this is Maurice’s daughter Dilly. I can’t decide if her fathers obsession with her is an unhealthy one. It is I believe, but maybe not as sick as I’d suspected. I was happy that she decided not to stay around he father and his best mate. She found a sort of freedom, while the others took a lifetime to find any sort of peace!

A book that is a tone-poem of dialogue mixed in with descriptive paragraphs...it may be put-offish to some readers of the traditional novel, who rightfully might ask: 'What is going on here?'. The storyline just doesn't flow together as many readers might want it to or expect it to. The author has adopted a prose style that is unique to most novel formats and ends up telling a story that is unlike other tales in that many of the details remain unknown even at book's end. He purposefully limits the info available to the reader by taking stylistic liberties from start to conclusion. However, he turns it all into an enjoyable, recommended novel even if the reader may desire a bit more.

Night Boat to Tangier is the story (if you can call it that) of two middle-aged Irishmen waiting at the terminus of the Morocco-Spain ferry for the daughter of one (although it could be the other), whom they suspect is travelling on that route as part of a group of migrant young rastafarians. They talk, and flash back to their younger days when they ran a drug ring, had some high times, and then watched everything fall to pieces. That's about it. But this novel isn't about the plot or even so much the characters, although Barry does a miraculous job making us care about two ex-drug traffickers (and users) bemoaning their lives, and the various sketchy types that they encountered. It's about the writing, which is remarkable (in every sense of the word).

There are really three books wrapped into this one, relatively modestly sized novel, each with wildly varying feels. The first is a straightforward narrative, told in flashback, with pretty standard noir-ish flourishes and a clipped, energetic style. The second is a Godot-like conversation (Barry owes a lot to Beckett) between the two men, told in a stylized, often funny, formal dialog that can't have been easy to pull off but is beautifully done. And the third is something like prose poetry: Short sentences set as their own paragraphs, with metaphors and images coming at you as from a machine gun, often in the form of just a word of two. These sections are absolutely stunning. The images don't always work, but there are plenty that are so good they stop you dead in your tracks to read them over and over. If there's a problem it's not that the metaphors are of mixed quality, but that the language is so rich in these sections that you don't appreciate the enormous talent on display.

Night Boat to Tangier is unremittingly bleak. But it's rescued by Barry's refusal to judge his characters (either the men or their daughter), and by giving them each a gallows humor about their fate that by the end comes close to redemption. Don't expect any sort of resolution; the narrative more or less just peters out. But for the language alone, Night Boat is Tangier is worth reading slowly, and savoring every last bit.

Two washed-up Irish drug smugglers, Maurice and Charlie, are hanging out in a Spanish port’s seedy ferry terminal, hoping to catch up with Maurice’s long lost daughter, Dilly. The book ends in the same place that it begins, but the pages in between tell us the long history between these two men, which has not always been amicable. In fact, despite their having been partners in crime, their lives intersect unexpectedly a couple of times and accordion back and forth between betrayal and reconnection, depression and jubilation, and lucidity and hallucination. This is definitely noir fiction, which I would normally love, but the structure, for me, is off-putting. Without quotation marks, the dialog is hard to distinguish from descriptive prose, and I found it difficult at times to identify the speaker. There is also a fair amount of what appears to be Irish slang, although even my kindle could not define every word. On the plus side, I think the author does an exceptional job of creating a dark, desolate, and threatening mood, despite the fact that I could not always follow the action. This is a challenging book to read and not one I can recommend, but it is relatively short and set in a darkly exotic part of the world. Prior to reading this novel, it had never occurred to me that on a clear night one might be able to see Africa from Spain. If only this book were just as easy to decipher.

Charlie and Maurice are waiting at the ferry terminal, hoping that Maurice's long lost daughter will show up there. That simple setup is the stage for conversation between the friends and memories of their lives. If you are happy to relax in the narrative, the wonderful prose, then this is the book for you. If you need an outcome, you may be disappointed. I'd give it four stars for narrative style, but can't bring myself to give it four overall.

I gave it 2 stars because it was well crafted and his descriptions are good, although repetitive and sometimes tiresome. Not recommended for reading while snowed in or quarantined. I lived in the UK for many years and still found the dialog difficult to follow - I can understand that the author may be popular in Ireland, but for others it is a 'hard slog'