The night is slowly passing. There is no word on the next boat. There are difficulties at port on the Tangier side. Difficulties are not unknown on either side. There is no sign of Dilly Hearne. Charlie Redmond knits his long, bony fingers behind his head. He is patient as a statue. Maurice Hearne turns his derby hat in his hands and considers its slowly turning rim, as if all the years are turning back.
In the ferry terminal at the Spanish port of Algeciras, two time-worn Irish gangsters scan the intermittent crowds for a certain young woman, small and pretty with Protestant-green eyes, who may be arriving that day – either to hop on a night boat to Tangier, or possibly arriving on one from the other direction. This woman – Dill or Dilly, for Dilya – is rumoured to be living as what the gangsters call a “crusty” (short for crustacean, or as the Spanish prefer, a perroflauta; literally translated as “dog-and-flute” and apparently meaning nomadic, dreadlocked hippie-types who move back and forth between Spain and Africa), and as Dilly is the missing daughter of one of the gangsters, and as they have not seen each other for three years, the menacing old men open Night Boat to Tangier in fraught and blackly humourous interrogation of anyone who looks like they might have information on the missing Dilly. This opening reads like a play (as, indeed, this story started life as one), but as the chapters progress, author Kevin Barry turns the dialogue-heavy introduction into a more expository, deep character study of the two gangsters. I have to admit that I found the chapters set in the ferry terminal, with Charlie and Maurice rambling on at each other in delightful West Ireland brogue, to be the more entertaining (I think I would like this as a play very much), but the addition of the backstories is what gives this narrative depth (and expository backstories, obviously, require the novel form). I've read Barry's two previous novels, and while I loved their language, I found their plots to be too surreal for my tastes. By contrast, Night Boat to Tangier has that lovely writing and a much more accessible storyline; this totally worked for me.
From the beginning, I delighted in Barry's description of his characters:
Charlie Redmond rises up from the bench in a bundle of sighs. He unfolds his long bones. He approaches the hatch. He's lame, and he drags the right peg in a soft, brushing motion, with practised ease. He throws his elbows onto the counter. His aura is of brassy menace. He wears a cornerboy's grimace. His Spanish pronunciation is very much from the northside of Cork city.
And:
Maurice Hearne’s jaunty, crooked smile will appear with frequency. His left eye is smeared and dead, the other oddly bewitched, as though with an excess of life, for balance. He wears a shabby suit, an open-necked black shirt, white runners and a derby hat perched high on the back of his head. Dudeish, at one time, certainly, but past it now.
(How Charlie injured his leg and Maurice his eye will prove to be two of the most pivotal parts of their history.) If I had a complaint, it would be that too often the shift from the present to the past would be signalled by something like: A troubled silence descends – the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent. When the chapters alternate between the present and the past, I really didn't need that shift to be telegraphed every time. Small complaint, though, because without these shifts (and if this were still a play) we wouldn't get the nice bits like this, from Dilly's POV before she took off for Spain:
The months proceeded. There was no remorse. It was summer again, and Dilly knew that it was the last one she would spend on the peninsula. On the June nights she went out to walk so as not to panic. She walked the clifftops in true dark. She sensed older presences as she walked. She knew by a cold stirring that here they had made their fires, and here their cattle had grazed, and here they ate periwinkles and oysters from the shell, and they had this burning salt on their lips, and felt this old rain, and made their cries of love and war, and roamed in hordes; their little kingdoms here were settled, and disassembled; by night, in our valley, the wolves had bayed.
Maurice and Charlie are quite horrible people – their criminality isn't romanticised – but Barry unveils their humanity over the course of this book, and it's fair to consider that even unrepentant gangsters can have their hearts broken. A short but enjoyable read; not surprising to see on the Man Booker longlist this year.
Man Booker Longlist 2019:
- Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
- Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
- Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer
- Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
- Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
- John Lanchester , The Wall
- Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
- Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive
- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
- Max Porter, Lanny
- Salman Rushdie, Quichotte
- Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein
Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
