Irish author Kevin Barry’s new novel, Beatlebone, is about a 37-year-old John Lennon who is suffering from a creative block and ‘coming loose of himself.’Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
After his first book, the fantastic short story collection There Are Little Kingdoms, was published in 2007, Kevin Barry, like many writers, found himself constantly being asked where his ideas come from.
"I developed a very eloquent, rather pat answer, about Hiberno-English and found dialogue," Barry says, sitting in a booth in a Toronto restaurant during a recent trip to the city, halfway through a double espresso. "I sounded extremely convincing, even to myself. Until one day I found myself delivering this [answer] to a rapt audience and thinking to myself, 'This is actually bollocks.' I realized that, in fact, everything that I write almost always starts with a place."
In the case of his just-released second novel Beatlebone, that place was Clew Bay in County Mayo, on Ireland's rugged west coast, and specifically Dorinish, a small, seven-hectare island – uninhabited except for some sheep and sea birds – that, it just so happens, John Lennon once owned. Beatle Island, as the locals used to call it, is about 130 kilometres due west of County Sligo, where Barry lives with his wife. He spends a lot of time cycling around the countryside, and these journeys often ended with Barry looking out over Clew Bay, "wondering which [island] it was, just idly." He wrote a magazine article about the island, as well as something for radio, and referenced it again in Dark Lies the Island, the title story of his 2012 collection. "But it kept coming back. And one day I found myself writing some dialogue, and I went, 'Oh no. I'm actually going to try and do John Lennon in a novel. I'm going to plunk him down, unasked, into one my my nutty stories. I'm going to put him in a van and send him to a pub dressed up as a dead sheep farmer.'"
But we're getting ahead of ourselves – that doesn't happen until 67 pages into Beatlebone, which takes that sliver of Lennon lore – the singer's purchase of Dorinish island in 1967 for all of £1,550 – and spins it into "the story of his strangest trip," as Barry writes early in the novel. The John Lennon of Beatlebone is 37 years old, suffering from a creative block, "coming loose of himself," and wants only to flee New York and his family and fame, and come to his island and be so lonely. As he says at one point, "I'll want to fucking die." Before he can get there – he's actually not even sure which island is his – the press learns of his arrival.
He falls under the care of Cornelius O'Grady, a Sancho Panza-like sidekick who serves as his therapist, bodyguard, chauffeur and confidante and who is tasked with keeping the media away and getting Lennon to "his fucking island," as the increasingly agitated singer incessantly demands. It's not that simple, and in the course of the novel Lennon winds up befriending a dog named Brian Wilson, getting smashed at a bar called the Highwood, abandoned in an old hotel run by a quasi-cult leader devoted to the peculiar practice of "ranting" and conversing with a talking seal while hiding out in a cave. Barry often writes "on the border of believability," and Beatlebone, he says, "was especially dipping its toes over."
It's being marketed as a novel, but the story of Beatlebone is told not just through prose but song lyrics, poetry, a radio play – it even includes a long essay in which Barry inserts himself into the narrative to discuss his own research into Lennon's life. "There's a lot going on in a 54,000-word novel," he concedes, then explains his M.O. thusly: "I'm trying to write a novel by doing anything but write a novel, you know what I mean?"
Last month, Beatlebone won the Goldsmiths Prize, which celebrates innovation in fiction, and, just before our interview, Barry had been sent a forthcoming review in The New York Times written by the musician, actor and author Steve Earle, who gushed "books like this come along once in a generation."
"You caught me on a good day," he says. "I was very nervous about the novel in the summer … because it's a tricky proposition to take. Not just any old iconic figure – it's not Bryan Adams." I mount a half-hearted defence of the Canadian rock icon, insisting a Canadian writer should do for the Summer of 69 singer what Barry has done for Lennon. "There's an idea. That's yours, man. Take it. Take it with my blessing."
Now 46 years old, Barry has become a far different writer from the one he envisioned he'd become. When he started out in his 20s, he fancied himself the next Saul Bellow. "I tried to write the next great Jewish-American novel – I was going to set it in Butte, Montana," he says. "It didn't work out." It was a subsequent novel – and the first to be published – that proved his breakout; City of Bohane, which in 2013 won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative in the world, tells the story of rival gangs in a near-future, yet oddly old-world Irish metropolis. Like all of Barry's work, it is strange, funny and, above all, brilliant, and it comes as welcome news that he's currently writing a sequel.
Even so, he maintains he wants every book he writes to be wildly different from what came before – with one exception.
"No matter what the project is, in terms of overall theme or structure or anything, my main ambition, always, is to pack as much intensity as possible into the sentences," he says. "I unashamedly write in the high style. The prose cavorts and leaps up and down on the page looking for attention like a hysterical child. I sometimes sit down and honestly say I'm going to write a quiet, thoughtful, subtle, pared-back short story. Inside half a page there's a talking badger or something."