Available:*
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and on the eerie bogs of Big Nothin' that Bohane really lives.For years, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there's trouble in the air. They say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchman is getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight...and then there's his mother.
Author Notes
Kevin Barry was born in 1969 in Ireland. He is the author of two collections of short stories and the novel City of Bohane. He started out as a frelance journalist writing a column for the Irish Examiner. He soon focused all of his time on writing. In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms. In 2011 he released his debut novel City of Bohane, which was followed in 2012 by the short story collection Dark Lies the Island. Barry won the International Dublin Literary Award for his novel City of Bohane in 2013. He also won the Goldsmiths Prize 2015 with his title Beatlebone.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (Vintage, pounds 7.99) The year is 2053 and we are in the west of Ireland. Logan Hartnett controls most of what's worth controlling in the city of Bohane, from the labyrinthine Back Trace to Smoketown. ("Smoketown was hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons and Chinese restaurants.") The main action starts when news reaches Logan that one of the Cusack family from the Northside Rises has been "reefed" in Smoketown and all hell breaks loose. Barry is a great storyteller, and the twists and turns of City of Bohane are satisfying, if, in places, familiar (all gangland narratives seem compelled to have the same dreary combination of over-sentimentality and violence). Barry's vernacular, like his plot, is a wonderful blend of past, present and imagined future. His characters all have different voices, and his free indirect style changes as it moves across the city. That Barry has control over all these registers, and makes them his own, is quite astonishing. This debut novel marks him out as a writer of great promise. - Scarlett Thomas The year is 2053 and we are in the west of Ireland. - Scarlett Thomas.
New York Review of Books Review
"City of Bohane," the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy. The form resembles an Icelandic saga welded to a ballad of the American West, although the location is in a place somewhere in Ireland, around the year 2053. In prose that is both dense and flowing, Barry takes us on a roaring journey, among human beings who are trapped in life its own damned self. Nostalgia grips many of them, even when they slash angrily at sentimentality. None of it is real, yet all of it feels true. This powerful, exuberant fiction is as true as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner and, in a different way, even the Broadway of Damon Runyon. Those places were not real. The stories remain true. The binding story here is about love. Two men, one woman, a shared place. Bohane itself is separated by class, tribe, vision. One of the men is Logan Hartnett, who runs the Fancy, the most fearsome gang in the city. He's also called the Albino or the Long Fella (though not because he writes poetry, which he doesn't) or simply Mr. H. The obscure, nameless, occasional narrator points out one detail: "Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalized graveyard but we all have our crosses." Logan is married to a woman now 43, tall, with a touch of Iberian beauty, made oddly more seductive by a cocked eye. Her name is Macu, from Immaculata. She and Logan are childless. They live in a "manse" in a comparatively welloff neighborhood, not far from the hotel that houses Logan's mother, a manipulative schemer who, as she nears 90, is still called "Girly." She is great nasty fun. The other man is Gant Broderick. He's powerfully built in a movie macho style, and was once called "the big unit" by some residents of Bohane. We meet him in the second chapter, riding into the scary city on the El train. This is where the Western ballad usually begins. Gant is heading for the crime-drowned Bohane district called Smoketown, where he had once been boss. Boss of shebeens (Irish speakeasies), "hoor stables," joints that sold hemp and other drugs through the sleepless nights. But now he has been away for 25 years. And still exudes physical strength. "He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks," Barry writes. But Gant is struggling with his emotions. He is, after all, riding into his own past. "The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled." He is also very happy to be home, hearing familiar slangy accents, the cawing of sea gulls, classical music playing in tender counterpoint from a kiosk, while inhaling the stink of decayed blood from a riverside slaughterhouse. This prodigal son knows where he is. One sentence sets up most of the rest of the novel: "He looked for her in every woman he passed, in every girl." Gant is looking for Macu, the girl he lost (along with his street power) to Logan. He hopes it is not too late to repair what happened when they were both a quarter of a century younger. Ludicrous. But for almost everybody in this novel, such hopes are just other types of drugs. Even the younger characters are afflicted with the presence of the "lost time" in Bohane, the collective memory of a period without dates, when something calamitous happened that is never spelled out. Then again, in this Irish novel Ireland isn't spelled out either. Bohane's main street is named for the long-dominant Irish political leader Eamon De Valera. Three housing projects are named for Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. The residents never mention any of them. Each project is ruled by a separate gang that bears the name of one of the great poets. In Bohane, there are no computers, no cellphones, no digital cameras (a photographer for the town's newspaper uses "a medieval Leica"). The "lost time" never refers either to the rise, or the fall, of the Celtic Tiger. All of the rest of Ireland is offstage. And Bohane lives an insular saga of recurring violence. The individuals seem trapped by biography, not by history. There are no texts of "the lost time," only songs. Calypso, the blues, scraps of rock. Heard at the midnight hour in bordellos and shebeens. No rousing Irish rebel songs. No tricolor flags. Instead, as in most sagas from Iceland to the O.K. Corral, transitions of power come through violence. Barry presents the contending forces with gathering momentum. The most important figure is the tough, intelligent daughter of some Chinese migrants. Her name is Jenni Ching. Even when her mother killed herself in the stinking black waters of the Bohane river, she stayed. Logan tries to hold off what seems to be coming, even agreeing to a formalized feud, written and declared on paper. The infantry on one side are made up of "pikeys," itinerants, outcasts, fashioning their own mores and their own language. The potential power base is expanding. And Jenni Ching can count. BUT Barry doesn't tell his tale in the style of Edward Gibbon. For me, he evokes the graphic language of certain master comic book artists from Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman all the way to Frank Miller, of "Sin City." That style is noirish: cinematic long shots, medium shots, close-ups, played against the deep, rich blacks of ominous night. Like a great movie director, Barry always pays careful attention to the way his characters dress. He knows that clothes also speak. They brag, they seduce, they persuade. Clothes suggest character. Even shoes - often in Bohane equipped with clicking metal taps - can add to their message. And clothes can also be a form of armor. In my own postwar adolescence in poor parts of Brooklyn (and in distant Los Angeles), the zoot suit, with its pegged pants and shoulder pads, was like a personal billboard: don't mess with me. Bohane is no different. On a local level, too, a menacing style can lead to control. Among Barry's characters, Logan knows this well. So does Jenni Ching. Reading this novel, with all of its violence, I also felt a kind of joy exuding from its author. The joy of finding, and sustaining, a voice. The joy of being surprised by his own inventions. I suspect that any reader, including the Irish, will sense that joy. It's about freedom. A warning: the freedom includes the use of much language usually described as "bad." But we have not read this book before. It is not a rehash, not assembled from a kit. In its hurtling prose, we understand again that the bad can be beautiful too. But part of Barry's triumph may be extra-literary. He preaches no sermons, embraces no cleansing delusions. In his Bohane, there are no saints, very few cleareyed witnesses, and many, many sinners. They make no art or beauty. But they live. Their major consolations are familiar to the human species: death, and rolling peals of dark laughter. For almost everybody in Kevin Barry's novel, hopes of reclaiming the past are just other forms of drugs. Pete Hamill is the author of 11 novels. The most recent is "Tabloid City."