Kevin Barry: ‘People expect me to be a raging alcoholic but it’s all oatmilk and yoga these days’

Limerick writer has gone back to 1999 to pick up where he left off for his ‘Western with Cork accents’

In his cheerfully chilly house in a small Irish village in Co Sligo, Kevin Barry is explaining why his latest novel took so long to write. Samuel Beckett is glaring at us from a large framed photograph hanging above the fireplace: even that most costive of writers might have thought a gestation period of 25 years for one book is going too far.

Barry (54) is transporting me back to 1999, when he was taking time out from freelance journalism to write his first novel. “I bought myself a small caravan, a little Father Ted job, put it on a beach in a beautiful spot in West Cork. And I had f***ing nothing to write about,” he says.

Glumly wandering around the coast, he stumbled one day on the abandoned copper mines in Allihies.

“The miners left when the mines played out in the late 19th century and I found out they all went to Butte, Montana, where they were starting to take up the copper to electrify the US,” says Barry.

“The Irish community operated out there in the way it always did in the US: first thing they did, they opened 38 pubs. Then they took over the police and then they took over the political apparatus. I immediately thought: this is a novel − a Western with Cork accents.”

Barry hotfooted it to Butte, a 14-hour Greyhound bus journey from Seattle.

A community with a proud Irish heritage, everybody was happy to talk to the visitor from Cork. Back home, Barry encountered a problem: he had too much material to squeeze into a book. “After about 120,000 words I quietly abandoned it. It’s upstairs under a bed, I haven’t been able to look at it.”

Barry went on to make a reputation as an outstanding writer of short stories and, in 2011, eventually published his first novel, City of Bohane, a pawky vision of the west of Ireland in the 2050s. His second novel, Beatlebone, a portrait of John Lennon, won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize; his third, Night Boat to Tangier, about two Irish gangsters, was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

After that, having learned how to shape a novel, he was finally ready to return to Butte. The result is The Heart in Winter, a glorious book with all the heart and excitement of a classic Western, couched in the mixture of lyrical style and offbeat comedy that has become Barry’s trademark.

The hero of the story is Tom Rourke, photographer’s assistant and balladeer, who keeps himself in funds for booze and opium by helping the miners write marriage proposal letters. “It was common practice to write to these Irish girls, in service in Boston or Chicago, that they’d never met: ‘Come out here and you’ll have a house.’ And these brave young women would come and marry these dudes straight off the train.”

In Barry’s story Polly Gillespie marries a mining boss within minutes of her arrival in Butte, but gets the hots for Tom: they run away into the mountains together, dodging the husband’s hired pursuers and encountering all manner of eccentric characters.

“I would say this was the happiest writing experience of my career,” says Barry.

With Sebastian Barry, Paul Lynch and Joseph O’Connor all having written Irish Westerns in recent years, the genre is in vogue. “A diaspora is a great way to write about your own people,” says Barry. “It’s also kind of instructive to remind ourselves that Irish people have always been migrants, economic refugees trailing off around the planet and always getting pretty warmly welcomed, when now much of the migration is into Ireland and causing all these tensions and pretty nasty rhetoric.”

Drink plays a large part in the new novel, as it seems to in all Barry’s work. “I think people expect me to be a raging alcoholic − no, it’s all oatmilk and yoga here these days,” he says. “But I write a lot about Irish men from working-class backgrounds − my own background − so alcohol’s inclined to come up. Also pubs are wonderful settings because people say all sorts of crazy things in them.”

Despite the earthiness of Barry’s work, there is usually a strong element of the spiritual too: ghosts and witchcraft feature in The Heart in Winter.

“It just comes out of the way Irish people are. You see that circle of trees over there?” he asks, pointing out of the window. “Just behind that is a fairy fort. And it’s not that the local farmers believe in fairies, but they won’t cut the trees there, ever.”

Barry lived a peripatetic life all over Ireland, Britain, Europe and the States until 2006 when he settled in this house − a former Royal Irish Constabulary barracks − with his wife, the academic Olivia Smith.

He thinks people find it harder to read novels now too, which is why he keeps his books short and intense.

Barry suspects that a growing “nostalgia for the pre-digital world” accounts for the success of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of Irish writing which he and his wife co-edit and publish in the form of a beautiful cloth-covered book.

“Olivia does 98pc of the work, I would say. It’s interesting that since we started it 10 years ago, all the artists and writers have moved out of Dublin: they just can’t afford it. But it’s good for the smaller places,” says Barry.

(© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2024)

“You see that circle of trees? Just behind that is a fairy fort. And it’s not that the local farmers believe in fairies, but they won’t cut the trees there, ever”