John Lennon’s desert island luxury

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien collaborating on a script for Tarantino. Beatlebone, his second novel (on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths prize for fiction) has Lennon fleeing New York in 1978 for a secret visit to Dorinish, the uninhabited island he bought 11 years earlier. Burned-out, creatively blocked, he craves a few days of solitude, to sit and stare at the surf. And scream. (In 1970 Lennon and Yoko took a course of Californian Primal Scream therapy. And he did buy the island.) Throughout the book, the fictional and the documented lives intermingle.

We first encounter Lennon in the back of an old Mercedes, bumping his way to the west coast of Ireland, driven by Cornelius O’Grady, an amiable but ambiguous cicerone, feeding Lennon’s paranoia with hints that the dreaded press could be on their trail.