Beatlebone

The silence that holds is easier now and London is pinkly waking. They've been through a lot together. The rattling of the bones; the squalls and the screeching; the occult shimmers; the lonely airs; the sudden madcap waltzes; the hollowed voices; the sibilant hiss; the asylum screams; the wretched moans; the violence, love, and tenderness – beatlebone. The first of the buses goes by at a sprightly chug.

Beatlebone was on my radar last year, but without ordering it from abroad, I couldn't get a copy of it for myself. I was able to read Kevin Barry's IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning The City of Bohane to get a taste of his style, and it honestly didn't knock my socks off. Lo and behold, Beatlebone appeared as a two dollar remainder at the bookshop, and despite the hype, and despite my own feverish teenaged Beatlemania, I remain unwowed. I love Irish writers, I am open to surrealism, I am primed for a John Lennon story, but despite my admiration for many of Barry's passages, this simply didn't add up to much for me.

He planned to live out on his island for a bit but he never did. He bought it when he was twenty-seven in the middle of a dream. But now it's the Maytime again and he's come over a bit strange and dippy again – the hatches to the underworld are opening – and he needs to sit on his island again just for a short while and alone and look out on the bay and the fat knuckle of the holy mountain across the bay and have a natter with the bunnies and get down with the starfish and lick the salt off his chops and waggle his head like a dog after rain and Scream and let nobody come find him.

Some bits of this story are apparently real – John Lennon did buy the isle of Dorinish off Ireland's west coast, and in the Seventies, he may have made some trips there. In our fictional version, John is thirty-seven, happily married to Yoko and retired from show business; yet he continues to be haunted by the loss of his mother when he was a teenager. Scream Therapy has brought some relief, and he reckons that if he could get to his island for three days of solitary screaming into the wind, he might be able to exorcise himself of her ghost for good. But getting to Dorinish proves tricky: saddled, somehow, with the local “fixer” Cornelius O'Grady – a buffoon who spies the press around every corner and insists on putting John in disguises and never taking the straight path from A to B – John despairs he'll never make it to Dorinish. Most of the plot involves this struggle – O'Grady wanting to hide out and accidentally-on-purpose introducing John to his own circle, while John becomes increasingly impatient – and the plot isn't really the point, I suppose. There was plenty of humour in the struggle, John flees to beachy nature and rediscovers his muse, and 80% of the way through, the author himself intrudes to explain why he's writing this book:

I took out a pad and began to make a sketch of the scene. The building itself is a Gotham folly, with dark stones, sombre turrets and an air of bespooked Victoriana, and as I drew I tried to imagine within its occult dreams, and the view across the trees, say on the night of a spring gale, in the soak of an insomniac sweat, as the trees shake out their fearful limbs, and the green shimmers of the treetop faeries move like gasses through the dark. The fact that I am myself tuned to occult frequencies – and frankly I have come to a point in my life where this is no longer deniable – felt like half the battle, but still I had a nagging worry at the edges of my thought, and it was this:

If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be, I needed to get to the island.

I don't need a paint-by-numbers story arc, but I do need something more than this to happen. As for the small scale writing, there were many perfectly savoury bits that I enjoyed immensely:

• He lies back in his seat, pale and wakeful, chalk-white comedian; his sore bones and age. No peace, no sleep, no meaning. And the sea is out there and moving. He hears it drag on its cables – a slow, rusted swooning. Which is poetical, to a man in the dark hours, in his denim, and lonely – it moves him.

• The sphere of the night turns by its tiny increments. The last of the night swings across its arches and greys. He can do anything he wants to do. He can live in a Spanish castle; he can run with the tides of the moon. He turns his face to settle his cheek on the dirt. He rests for a while. Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky. He lies for a long calm while until the hills are woken and the birds come to flirt and call and he feels clairvoyant now and newly made. John lies saddled on the warm earth and he listens to its bones.

Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize (awarded to fiction that "opens up new possibilities for the novel form"), so if one wanted to make the claim that this book's genius simply went over my head, I'd accept that. Still wasn't my cuppa, but I'm happy to have finally read it.