Several months have passed since the publication of Kevin Barry's fourth novel The Heart in Winter and the dust is still settling.
The enfant terrible of Irish letters has written about everything over the years from an imagined post-Dystopian Cork City sprawl to John Lennon engaging in primal scream therapy off the West Coast of Ireland - so it was a surprise for some to find him on (relatively) mellow form in his new book.
But the Kevin Barry of 2024 is not the Kevin Barry of 2004. Having been at the forefront of an Irish literary renaissance for the best part of two decades, he now resides in rural County Sligo with his partner (and Winter Papers co-editor) Olivia Smith.
You’ve developed certain themes that you come back to again and again, one of which is the figure of the rogue or the rebel. What is it about those characters that draws you in?
Often they’re characters who are sniffy, who have elevated views of themselves. That’s certainly the case with Tom Rourke [the protagonist of The Heart in Winter]. I suppose he’s trying to project an image of himself onto the world and see if it’ll stick in some way, to make him into the kind of outlaw poet-type figure he wants to be.
1891 is significant because the two lovers at the centre of the novel meet in a photographic studio. This was a time when, for the first time in history, ordinary people from ordinary backgrounds could afford to think about their own image. And Tom comes into this searching for an identity. Polly is already very sure of who she is. She’s more comfortable in her own skin, and the two of them share this interest in how they look together; thinking about how it would play out if someone was watching them from above.
It also feeds into the myth-making and the fiction-making that went on around the American West as a last frontier; a place where you could make yourself new. Especially since 'settling’ that part of the world was sold unreliably as virgin ground where you could make your mark and be who you wanted to be. And look, there’s always an interest in writing these kind of outsiders who are a bit gangsterish, just for the sheer fun of it.
What was it about Butte, Montana that drew you towards that it as a setting?
I became interested in this footnote story from Irish labour history. About copper miners from County Cork who went to Butte, and allowed me to write a Western with Cork accents! There were thousands of them—something like a third of the population of Butte at that time were from Ireland—and about 90% of those were from County Cork. So it was a good way into that world.
And the diaspora is great for writers because it gives you the possibility of realistically setting your stories everywhere. Butte is a a lesser-written history than, say, what we know about the Irish in Boston or New York or Chicago, so it felt like an interesting way to look at Irish America in microcosm.
You have all this old stuff stored in the recesses of your mind, and there's the possibility that at some point a spark will ignite and something takes fire.
I think it's important at the present time to remind ourselves that we’ve always been economic refugees, economic migrants. We almost invented it. Settling, looking for work. We’ve always been very good at it, because we’re generally thought of as quite personable; smiling, chatty characters who get on well around the place, but with that native kind of canniness or cuteness that allows us to adapt easily and thrive.
Have you been to Butte?
I was there in 1999 for some initial research around novel, but haven’t been back since. Probably because I only started writing it again in 2021. But by then I had all this rich material banked up from those earlier notes; the texture of the town, its bars and brothels, opium parlours, all of that… so I didn’t feel like I needed to go back.
There was also something about having done the research more than two decades earlier that imbued the material with this kind of wistful nostalgia; an elegiac feeling for the material which I had a lingering fondness for. And that feeling helped me bring warmth into the story, which is a difficult quality to play with in your fiction.
So this project has been a labour of love for you for the past 25 years...
I wasn’t really aware that I was sticking with it, as such—not at first—because this was something I’d abandoned in the early 2000s. I had no thoughts about bringing it back up to my desk until 2021, when I suddenly had a very vivid idea of who the characters were supposed to be. And that was the one thing which was missing when I tried it initially. I had the atmosphere and ambiance, all those textural things, but I didn’t have strong characters who could take me through it. So it’s not something I was actively thinking about during all that time.
One thing you discover about a writing practice is that the longer it goes on, there are always lots of abandoned ideas and abandoned projects, but that even when you leave them alone for a long time they’re never fully abandoned. You never fully give up on anything. It’s all going on at a subconscious level. You have all this old stuff stored in the recesses of your mind, and there’s the possibility that at some point a spark will ignite and something takes fire.
In this case, it was late Pandemic-era, walking in the woods around County Sligo and imagining a kind of Western scenario play out. In my mind’s eye, very quickly, I started seeing a young man and a young woman riding double on a horse, and thinking, well, if they’re riding double they must have gotten themselves into bother. They’re trying to get away from some place. And in that train of thought, it became ‘What if it was Butte, Montana, 1891?’ I know that place. I have all that texture and setting already. Which was the first time I’d thought about it in over 20 years.
Watch: Kevin Barry talks The Heart in Winter
When you get that initial spark—if you have the characters and the stage setting—you're already on your way, and once I had that the book kind of wrote itself. Once I could see this pair on a horse, I felt that I knew things about them. I knew that they’d both be slight, very small, even if I didn’t say it explicitly in the book. I imagined Tom being about five six, five seven; this poetical waif drifting around the place. And I knew Polly would be tiny too, though they’re both full of this dark energy and the impulse to make something happen; to recognise this big drama about to play out in both their lives.
Writing a love story is hard because because you’re immediately surrounded by sentimentality, and you have to try not drown in the goo, to make it work for the page. As in life, characters who are in love have to believably seem right for each other.
Did you have a sense of what their backstories might be before coming to Butte? Polly’s is alluded to at several points throughout, and even though Tom is more of a closed book, we can intuit a pre-existing darkness there.
Part of their appeal is that I don’t know myself what their previous lives looked like. All I knew was that they both had stuff which they were keeping, that they wanted to consign to the past, and the West for them was this stage where they could start from scratch again. Be new people and get a get a chance to live life twice.
I think I also reacted slightly against my last novel, Night Boat to Tangier, which opens in the present moment and follows back from that point into the histories of these characters. I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted to be respectful of the Western genre, because Westerns have this propulsiveness. There has to be a bit of gallop to it. So I didn’t want this story to keep delving into the past too much; more kind of shading it in, alluding to textures which allowed the bigger picture to breathe. Because these are people who want to start again. Everything in their pasts which is over for them should be over for us as well.
It goes back to a book I read years ago, Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban. It’s this nonfiction retelling about the settling of eastern Montana in the early 1900s, which talks about how the railroad companies attracted people out West by selling fictions about the place. All this stuff about how you could start again, make yourself new, and live this life filled with terrific adventure. It was bullshit. People came out and ended up settling on terrible land in the most extreme conditions, and I became interested in the way that fictional techniques were used to sell people the idea of that life.
It occurs to me that Tom makes something of a living doing that. He writes letters for people for the purposes of marriage proposals and writing letters home. He’s an inventor of fictions for other people as well as himself.
He is, and that job of writing letters for miners was something that really existed. Whether they were looking for wives or writing home to relatives… It wasn’t that they were illiterate, necessarily, more that they wouldn’t have known what to say. Often they had no idea about the correct way to talk to women.
But Tom has this silver-tongued element to his character. And he’s a ballad maker, which incidentally was another job that really existed around the bars in Butte during the 1890s. They might write ballads for particular mines, saying stuff about how these miners were the fiercest and toughest of men, the hardest workers, the best drinkers, the best men for women. All of that. And it goes back to the Irish tradition of ballad making which had been around for many centuries before.
Writing a love story is hard because because you're immediately surrounded by sentimentality, and you have to try not drown in the goo...
One thing I wanted to ask you about is the subtle, repeated strain in your writing that gestures toward towards the otherworldly. There are fairy mounds in Night Boat, time slips in Beatlebone and haunted forests in The Heart in Winter. What is it about the paranormal and the world of vice that attracts you? Why bring those two things together?
When we’re talking about an other world in a paranormal sense, or an occult sense, we’re really talking about the realm of the imagination. People try and put narrative sense on their lives, and always end up moving towards a condition of shapelessness, and as a result we end up buying into beliefs and ideas just to make sense of it. Did I upset the gods? Did I upset the spirit? It all goes back to fiction-making. And I’m not going to argue one way or the other about whether such things are out there, but these things do serve a purpose in trying to put narrative cohesion on our lives; lives which are often strange and mysterious enough on their own.
I also wanted to put a little magic in there, which is obviously a fine balance to get right. Like writing about love. You could very easily fall into some corny s**t if you went the wrong way, though if there’s a real-life justification it would be to keep something of the Irish tradition alive. If I look out my window at the Sligo countryside, the only trees left standing in the middle of all these fields are whitethorn trees. Trees which haven’t been cut down because of a folk belief that goes right back to the pagan era. I like to bring the fun of that in where I can.
It’s tied up with a sense of place too, I think. Like psychogeography, where the land is imbued with a sense of mysteriousness that infiltrates the characters. Would it be fair to say that the landscapes as well as the characters in your books are haunted by something?
I think what most reliably provides inspiration for me is a sense of place. Passing through somewhere, feeling possibilities for it in a fictional setting. It might be a city, or it might be a forest, or it might be a street corner. When it came to writing Montana in the late 1990s, I already had an idea of what I wanted it to be. This northern, forested wilderness, very lonely, very exotic. And then after I visited and later came to know who my characters were, I knew that to put this couple into a forest was to make it a fairy tale on some level.
With Night Boat to Tangier, that came from going to Spain over the years and wanting to use the texture of Spanish train stations and ferry ports; that constrained sort of ambience you only seem to get in those places… Really it’s important for me to get out of the house, allow my writing to travel a bit, because it’s what gets me going more than anything. Place, that is. The characters will come from that and when they do, I have this readymade landscape for them to play in when they arrive.
The Heart In Winter is published by Canongate
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