There she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon. Now that there’s a suretell sign, Ding Dong said, that it’s come to a time in your lives you need to act. And the dude Ding Dong he spoke with this like weird authority.
Little river was moving some ice already and long picks of it gleamed like running knives in the dark. They walked on and further on. It was such a clear night and all the stars were out. It was very cold. They sat there together in the wood all huddled up in their coats and shivered and they were miserable in love and they held on to each other for a long time out of the need and they could hear each other breathing.
There is no decision, he said, we’ve just got to be together and she didn’t have to tell him he was right about that.
This is so up my alley: I’ve said many times that I love an Irish storyteller, and as it turns out, just maybe I love a Western, too. Set in October of 1891 in Butte, Montana (“screeching and crazy and loud as the depths of hell”), The Heart of Winter is at heart a love story — star-crossed, soul-struck, forbidden love — and in the hands of Kevin Barry, this story is funny, surreal, and tense. Like a mashup of everything I loved in Days Without End, The Sisters Brothers, and The Luminaries, this novel was thoroughly entertaining, emotionally touching, and delightful in its language; I could not have asked for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He thought of them now as he lay dim-eyed and roostered. It was in a mood of sadness and fun combined that he thought of the pair. My-name-Tom and my-name-Polly. They were giddy and green and always kinda jumpin. They were in love with each other too much. They were drawn by natures twined and persuadable to a terrain vague was what the Frenchman of the olden times would call it. It was to a world between worlds they were drawn. They were headed into this unknowable place without map to it nor the sense to be afraid even and they were in this regard heroical. Death hovered close by the lovers always. It was around them like a charge on the air. It was like a blue gunpowder waft. It was like electricity. They had an aspect of cool affront to life and so it was deathwards they were drawn —
Or at least that’s how the philosophic Métis was figuring things.
Approaching thirty, Irish born Tom Rourke has grown up in Montana territory: he works as an assistant photographer, writes love letters on behalf of illiterate miners, and spends his evenings drinking hard, smoking opium, and visiting his favourite sex workers. Polly Gillespie — a mail order bride who isn’t quite as young or innocent as she had portrayed herself in her letters — comes into the photography studio for a portrait with her new husband, mine boss Long Ant’ny Harrington, and one glance between Tom and Polly cements between them that they were meant to be together. As the publisher’s blurb states (skip this if you want to go in blind like I did), the pair runs away together but Harrington hires some rough “Jacks” to hunt them down, and what follows is half romance/half tense and atmospheric adventure story.
It was hard to choose quotes for this review because the magic comes in long passages, rather than pithy bites, but I did find the whole thing magical. The dialogue is snappy, the setting is gorgeously rendered, the characters (and especially the supporting characters) are unique individuals, and the plot is unpredictable. The romance is believable, but over everything, is a layer of fate and enchantment and access to otherworldly powers:
She leaned in close then with her claw to his chest and whispered some crazy stuff and he laughed and he laughed harder again the stranger the words got. It was like she was speaking in the tongue but it had no connection with any god you might think of. She just let it come from inside. She didn’t even think about it. These were words that came from a place that was deep inside. A place that was before our world and time. That was a deepdown place and forest-like. And he laughed and shook a bit and she let the words come with her claw to his chest and she was raking him pretty good. She let him know they both came from this same place. We can be in it still, she said. We can be in it whenever we need to be and we can always talk to each other there. He was on top of her then biting at her neck and breast and they surely understood each other and the whole thing was just the kind of luck that don’t even come once in a lifetime for most.
Some paragraphs took reading through two or three times before I could make sense of them, and I don’t know if you’d call this writing style heavily ironic, post-modern, or straight-up surrealism, but I was thoroughly entertained, intellectually engaged, and emotionally touched throughout. This may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it suited my own precisely. My favourite by Barry so far.
