Dreamy ‘Beatlebone’ reimagines a lost and longing John Lennon
John Lennon purchased a private island, Dorinish, off the northwestern coast of Ireland in 1967, yet he hardly spent any time there before he was murdered in New York in 1980. This simple, sad fact animates Kevin Barry’s misty new novel, Beatlebone (Doubleday, 320 pp., stars out of four), which looks back on the rock icon as a vessel of longing and a spirit of loss for those of us trailing in the wake of the great Beatle’s music and mind.
Barry is the acclaimed Irish novelist whose first book, City of
Bohane, marked him as a prose poet in the profane and priestly tradition of Gaelic modernists from James Joyce to J.P. Donleavy.
In Beatlebone, he casts his Lennon back to 1978 and imagines the great man on a quest to spend a few days on his island, away from fame and family. There he plans to scream his way to some inner peace and fresh creativity, per Dr. Arthur Janov’s “primal therapy,” which Lennon famously bought into.
Things proceed comically, in brief paragraphs, with no quotation marks, all of it skipping like stones across water as Lennon connects on the Irish coast with a bearish, avuncular driver, Cornelius, who helps him dodge the press and promises to deliver him to the island. It takes a while, with pub-crawling stopovers and hangovers, including a darkly funny interlude with what’s left of a hapless hippie cult.
Led by a hoggish guru, the group’s therapy is to “rant” nastily at each other when they’re not having sex. John is annoyed and amused, and he realizes it’s all a version of his own screamer solution to the insoluble mystery and melancholy of life. Abandoned by his father and mourning his be- loved mother, Julia, John is a lost boy who can’t lose himself enough, an everyman we can pity and admire, driven to painful peaks of self-awareness by his great renown and soulful genius.
Throughout, the Beatlephile Barry makes playful reference to Beatle myth and Lennon lyrics (John is “so tired, he hasn’t slept a wink,” and there’s the “ducktail joint” of Cornelius’s hair style, although younger, casual Beatle fans will easily miss these nods).
As a stylist, Barry can be breathtaking (“the sea-rasp outside hoarse as love”), but the novel hits a metafictional reset after 200 pages, when Barry inserts himself into the action and sets off on his own journey to John’s island, suggesting that any work of fiction is really about the author.
This draws us into an essayistic realm that breaks the fictional reverie, and some readers will bridle at the disruption and the self-regard. It’s a delight to read, nonetheless.
John Lennon would very likely approve of Barry’s artistic daring, his wordplay, his grasp of the surreality and dreamy isolation of the Emerald Isle. Like Lennon, this book is equal parts inspiration, heart and bone.