What would it have been like to hang out with John Lennon? Kevin Barry explores the idea in his trippy novel Beatlebone.
Kevin Barry delivers a lyrical exploration of love, fate and death, taking the late former Beatle to Ireland for scream therapy and solitude
Beatlebone, the strange and exhilarating new novel by Irish writer Kevin Barry, is about John Lennon — kind of. It follows him closely for around 200 pages, through a few comically calamitous days in 1978, as he travels through western Ireland to an island off its coast, bought on a lark 11 years earlier. He’s nearing 40 here; past drugs, past scream therapy, far past the Beatles, and stripped raw emotionally, tired “but not for sleeping”, full of “large sad warmish feelings”.
A few days alone on his island, he hopes, will bring him the peace that even marriage and fatherhood, though he loves them, haven’t. The poignant knowledge that this is an end-of-life crisis, not a middle-of-life one: That belongs to us, not to him.
These first 200 pages are nearly perfect, observant, melancholy but not mournful, and tremendously funny, largely because John’s endearingly lofty vision of his trip’s purpose, a communion with nature and himself, runs immediately into very practical problems. For starters he has trouble simply finding his island; the local fixer taking care of him, a man named Cornelius who is incapable of fixing anything, doesn’t have a great idea of how to get there. He tries anyway, leading his famous charge through a series of misadventures, as they dodge journalists, visit the pub in disguise and become stranded in a derelict hotel with a few holdovers from the hippie era.
And then another character enters the book: Barry himself.
Suddenly it’s 2011, and we’re inside his head as he stands “with all the other hunched pilgrims” outside the Dakota in New York, the apartment building where John Lennon lived and was killed. Barry realises something. “If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be,” he writes, “I needed to get to the island.” And so he sets off.
This gesture is at least as old as Laurence Sterne — “baring the device”, literary critics named it nearly a century ago — but in this context it feels startling, even risky, because
Beatlebone would have been an excellent novel without it, a tender portrait of a man “37 years along the road — the slow-quick, slow-quick road”, as the novel puts it in a typically lovely, darting line.
And yet the risk pays off. The hallmark of Barry’s previous fiction has been his remarkable gift as a stylist; in his only other novel, the much-honoured City of Bohane, a slangy tale about a gang war in the near future, a glance could be a “lamp”, a “check”, a “sconce” — quick-witted coinages at once low and literary, in that peculiar, flexible Irish fashion. But City
of Bohane was also, in its thinner moments, filmic in the wrong ways, like a Quentin Tarantino reboot of West Side Story, its violence and lurking sentimentality correlated.
Beatlebone is far more profound. Barry’s language is still poetic and reaching and imaginative, but now in effortless service to more substantial themes, in particular love and “the way that time moves”. As the novel’s attention alternates between Barry’s real trip to the island and John’s made up one, the identities of the two men — both artists, both marked by the loss of their mothers — mingle, until their stories begin to overlap more and more exactly, and finally the two become indivisible, ghosts of each other across the decades. The effect is beautiful, reminiscent at different moments of Virginia Woolf and Geoff Dyer, especially the ambiguous narrator of Dyer’s wonderful novel Jeff in Venice,
Death in Varanasi.
Yet it also leaves lingering a significant question, which is how close this book, as it moves further away from John Lennon, actually ever got us to him. Or is that the author’s point: that any work about an artist is in some sense a self-investigation, and that to introduce yourself into the narrative is the most honest way to admit that?
I happen to love the Beatles, so ardently that I sometimes think that if I could preserve the work of any artists from the last century, shipping it down into the care of our descendants, it would be theirs. Which means, of course, loving John Lennon.
Beatlebone faultlessly captures Lennon’s acidic, self-loathing, yearning, weary side. (And his sense of humour, too, an essential element: “Do you have a reservation?” a hotel clerk asks him. “I have severe ones,” he replies, “but I do need a room.”) What Barry finds more elusive is the other part of John, which remained innocent enough to create the luminous songs he wrote throughout the 1970s.
So when John says late in Beatlebone, “I think we should all love and ravish each other but I’m holding out no great hopes”, it’s as if Barry really were the one speaking, with a novelist’s appreciation for the complex messedup-ness of the world. John Lennon always did seem to hold out great hopes.
Even as the journeys of the author and his protagonist merge, Barry and Lennon remain stubbornly distinct. But perhaps what ultimately makes this a great novel is its author’s exploration of the ways that sometimes, in art, we do get to become each other — kind of.