Butte, Montana, 1891, a magnet for Irish immigrants seeking their fortune at its famous copper mines. Here we meet Tom Rourke, tortured soul, ballad maker, and a man whose Hibernian eyes gleam with ‘the lyric poetry of an early death’. The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry depicts his electrifying love affair with the wife of a mine captain and their subsequent flight for freedom, in possession of purloined banknotes and pursued by vengeful hired gunmen. All hail a gleefully delinquent outlaw tale of wild hearts and hard lives, and the first Irish western I’ve ever read.
Tom Rourke was never going to make it as a miner. A man of words and musicality, he scores booze and smokes by composing songs for the innumerable bars that grace the town. He also pens lonelyhearts-type letters for his fellow migrant countrymen, his wordsmithery strikingly successful in a very nineteenth-century spin on the mail-order bride phenomenon.
The only paying job suitable for a man of his artistic bent in the town of Butte is as a photographer’s assistant, at a portrait studio. It’s here, one fateful afternoon that Captain Harrington of the Anaconda mining company arrives for a matrimonial portrait shot with his new wife. Her name is Polly Gillespie, she has wren’s-egg blue eyes, ‘a rascal set to her jaw’, and she knows all about trouble (the type with ‘a capital T’).
Deliciously atmospheric and infused with sly humour, Barry’s Old West tale is a strange brew of brutality, debauchery, and bright, blazing love. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the pyrotechnics between Tom and Polly, with their lusty and intoxicated stolen nights, hiding out in the shadiest parts of town with the brawlers and the brothel girls. Tom tells Polly that whatever their souls are made of, it’s the same substance, and on the night he comes to her, opiate-fuelled and with eyes ‘pinned and burning like stars,’ they decide to run away to San Francisco.
Anyone familiar with the unbridled machismo of the Western genre (all those sheriffs, showdowns and shoot-outs), will wonder whether the couple can possibly escape with their planned loot, as well as from the heavies sent after them by the cuckolded Captain Harrington. Barry has great fun with these elements, his gunslinging bounty hunters possessed of both pantomime grotesquerie and a darkness familiar to the entire cast of characters.
Take this brilliant description of gunsman, Jago, emptying his bladder whilst in a whiskey haze:
‘He relieved himself fully to the roar of oceanic applause. He stood gormlessly then with drained apparatus to hand and tasted the sourness of his life- a melancholic, slave to the infinite sadness’
The local lawman, Sheriff Devane, is himself particularly attuned to the melancholic (often a ‘complication’ in his working life), and sighs to take on the case of Tom Rourke. These unruly, death-haunted Irish, he thinks, ‘terrible people, born of a terrible nation’.
With both the law and the lawless on their trail, Tom and Polly head towards California, sustained by wild love, serendipitous encounters, and some intense psychedelics. A dark cloud is in tow.
A unique and glorious read.
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry is published by Canongate, 224 pages.
