Outlaw love
The Western is a well-trodden genre, defined as much by place and time as by character and plot. So much part of the American myth of freedom and self-sufficiency, it is arguably become part of the United States’s propaganda arsenal. Of course, we swallow it, for the most part, probably because the story of lone man battling nature and other men (it is almost always men in the Western) segues so well with the Greek narrative arc of journey, conflict, and resolution. There is always the element of travel, of movement toward an envisioned paradise, whether it be the return home or the settlement of fertile, well-watered lands. The Western is arguably Homer’s The Odyssey in various guises.
But Kevin Barry, in his new novel The Heart in Winter, while leading us on the Western path, finds a fork less travelled on this trail, and is able to avoid the covert propaganda and myth-making that would normally exist in any story set west of Pennsylvania in the 19th Century. The fork Barry takes is love. Not just any love, but love of the blind, drunk, stupid, mad, and fatal kind. The love which drives all other considerations from view. The kind of love you know can never last – it is simply impossible to sustain; it burns too bright – but you hope against hope it will. You hope, because somewhere in all of us, no matter how deeply buried, is a Romantic. You also think there might just be a chance in hell these two characters, Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, can get it right because they’re not some pair of greenhorns. You pick up pretty quickly that these two have done some things, and not only because they’re not that young – not in frontier terms anyhow.
Tom and Polly are both wonderfully flawed characters. Tom earns his money for drink and opium by working for an eccentric photographer and writing love letters to potential spouses for the illiterate mining men of Butte, Montana, in between prowling the alleys of the night for his fix and his fun. Polly? Well, we get the impression she also prowled some alleys before duping the Butte mining boss into paying her railroad fare from the east so he can whisk her off to the registry office soon as she put foot on Montana soil. Of course that mining boss didn’t get much enjoyment from her before she’s off with scoundrel Tom.
But what endears these characters to us is their total commitment to each other, along with their exchanges that defy all the perceived conventions – both ours and of the world in which they exist. Their soul-entwined harebrained elopement, combined with Barry’s prose startlingly pared to language’s bloodied bones, makes The Heart in Winter a story that can make you guffaw while you anxiously turn the page in expectation of doom at any moment.
It is the kind of language that slaps you in the face so that you have to read the first page twice. At least twice before the stripped rhythm wraps you within its seduction. Many are the passages of beauty. Not for their elegance, their metaphorical flights. No, for the unflinching plainness, verging on brutality, with which the world is wrought through words. It is this wryness, combined with a cynicism so crooked it verges on optimistic, that holds the charm.
For instance: “His noggin end was a tower of screeching bats, as of some haunted West Country moor; his stomach was a failing metropolis; his vision was blurred and flickering. He stumbled and groaned and bounced from the walls. He found his boots if only by the touch and wept his way into them. He staggered to the pisspot and aimed for it out of some remnant delicacy. He relieved himself fully to the roar of oceanic applause. He stood gormlessly then with drained apparatus to hand and tasted the sourness of his life – a melancholic, slave to the infinite sadness, he wondered if he might get through the day without opening his throat. Fuck it, he could try.”
That’s not Tom, he’s talking about, by the way.