Lacrimae rerum: That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners, and three captivating novels. First, the baroque mayhem of City of Bohane, characters exploding on the page flashing knives and fancy footwear, its vernacular veering from Clockwork Orange argot to Joycean dazzle. A world away from the beguiling charm of Beatlebone, which imagined a stressed-out John Lennon driving across Ireland to check out the uninhabited island he’d bought years earlier as a future bolthole.

Barry’s triumphant third novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long-listed for the Booker, opened with two old crims waiting at the ferry terminal of a Spanish port for the girl who links their lives, reminiscing endlessly as they wait. Violent and tender, it escaped the long shadow of Beckett to create its own unforgettable dark shape.

Now comes his third collection of short stories, That Old Country Music. Shafts of high comedy have always distinguished Barry’s work, the swerve from grief into blessed laughter, devastating throwaway lines summing up a life or a failure. His knockout way to turn a sentence remains, but there are fewer laughs here; urban larks and verbals replaced by an undercurrent of sadness: lacrimae rerum.

Barry’s favoured territory is small-town Irish. This collection, written over eight years, takes him deeper into his homeland, the wild places, the old country, to hear its hidden music. There’s less repartee; people talk to themselves, the characters no longer dominant — rather, figures in a landscape. There are losers, loners, and — unusually for Barry — women: a pregnant girl confronts her life as she waits on a rural back road while her lover botches a robbery; a Roma child escapes her detention fate to find an unlikely saviour in the Sligo countryside. Under a Spanish moon a vagrant dreams of the Irish homeland he wilfully abandoned.