Doubleday
Review by Brian Tanguay
“It informed me that there had been others before as deranged by matters of the heart and loins as I was now.” This line from the story “Saint Catherine of the Fields” neatly describes the overarching theme of Kevin Barry’s short story collection, That Old Country Music. Admirers of Barry — and I count myself among them — will recognize the Irishman’s dark humor and lyrical tone in each of the eleven stories that make up this splendid collection.
Night Boat to Tangier was my introduction to Kevin Barry, and that novel was enough to hook me. In these stories we encounter the same sort of rough, unpolished characters, often at loose ends and on the margins, either warped by drink, loss or some other human shortcoming. In “Ox Mountain Death Song” an aging policeman hunts for Canavan, a habitual malcontent from a clan of malcontents. For decades and centuries, Barry writes, the Canavans “brought to the Ox elements that were by turn very complicated and very simple: occult nous and racy semen.” Canavan, a smirking satyr, has terminal cancer and may be more dangerous to his neighbors than ever. When the policeman finally catches up with him, Canavan is sitting outside a cave in the hills, smoking a cigarette. The policeman is torn between belting his long-time nemesis and kissing him. And then he helps Canavan over a cliff with a quick shove in the back.
Such are the conflicting emotions that Barry uses to wonderful effect. In the title story, a pregnant young woman named Hannah waits for the return of her boyfriend who has gone to rob a petrol station with a claw hammer. She sits in a van and waits for this boy who assures her that desperate times often turn out to be disguised opportunities. Time passes, the weather changes, there’s no sign of the boyfriend. She can’t drive away because her boyfriend took the keys. When Hannah opens the back of the van and sees the claw hammer she realizes the game: she has been abandoned. “He had softened her merely with glances, his touch and words. More than softened, she had been opened.” And now she’s alone in the blinking fields and the whispering gorse, with her enlarged tummy, and the person who comes to her rescue is not who she expected.
In “Who’s-Dead McCarthy”, Con McCarthy keeps meticulous track of everyone who has died in town, not only time and place but the manner in which they met their end. “Did you not hear?” Con McCarthy asks all and sundry, establishing himself as a person worthy of resolute avoidance. “Dead on the floor before they got to him.” McCarthy is the messenger of death of O’Connell Street, though when his own time is up it’s with a “spectacular absence of fanfare,” and only a brief line in the local paper. Contemplating McCarthy’s demise the narrator wonders if perhaps the town crier of death wasn’t the sanest of them all, the one among them who refused to turn his mind from the inevitable. It’s why the narrator feels a sudden urge to swerve into oncoming traffic, just to feel the taste of metal on his lips.
Primal matters of heart and loins, of clear raw light, dreamy glens and rooky woods, eternal dampness and quiet desperation. Kevin Barry plays with these elements in a way that reveals and rewards.
