‘Beatlebone’: Imagined trip with Lennon

“BEATLEBONE” by Kevin Barry. Doubleday. 299 pages. $24.95.

“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.”

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 realizes 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. Barry’s language is poetic and reaching and imaginative, but 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.

“Beatlebone” faultlessly captures Lennon’s acidic, self-loathing, yearning, weary side. And his sense of humor, 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.”

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 messed-upness of the world.