Review: Night Boat to Tangier

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a staggeringly good novel.

Think Waiting for Godot meets Pulp Fiction. Or think Hammett at his best somehow conversant in the details of the 21st century.

Better yet, don’t think of anything else you’ve read. When I started this, I got the strange feeling that Barry had somehow invented the novel all by himself, that he’d found a new way to tell a sustained story, one that managed to do without conventional dialogue or recognizable paragraph structure. And yet, somehow, the novelty of it works. There’s a story, one that, as it folds and re-folds onto itself, becomes ever richer. And there are characters who, despite spending the present tense of the novel sitting in wait for a series of night boats from Tangiers (as the title promises) become ever more human, ever more tragic in the smallness of their dreams and the vastness of their hunger.

The back cover blurb was enough to get me interested – a pair of aging Irish gangsters waiting for a boat to come in – but this is so much more than the sum of its action that, as the saying goes, it feels like calling Moby Dick a novel about a whale.

Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond are down-on-their-luck, 50 year-old former drug dealers. They’re in Tangiers hoping to find Dilly, Maurice’s daughter, who’s run away to live a vagabond life in Spain. But, again, it’s not the what of that, nor even the how, so much as the ever-echoing why. As they sit and wait – sometimes intimidating younger people they think might have word of Dilly – they ponder the nature of death and, though it sounds trite to say it, the meaning of life. The violence, the love, the heroin highs and the existential lows have to have meant something, they all but say to each other. Neither has a satisfying answer, but neither can quite give up either.

I’m paraphrasing here, of course. Much as I’d insist those are the questions they ask, the language they use is a kind of everyday Irish poetry. I’d have to quote the whole book – short and lyrical enough that it’s tempting to call it a kind of poem – to give a full sense, but here’s some flavor.

“Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low fifties. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air” (2).

Or, “It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma – a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it – and Hibernian easement for it: fuck it, we’ll go for an old drink” (20).

The details matter, because they’re the stuff of the lives of two men who, though so close to potential caricature, become ever more human. At the same time, the details don’t matter. It’s just two men, confronting their mortality on a mostly fool’s errand to find a young woman who seemingly wants no more to do with them, who can’t quite surrender the urge to compel life to mean what they once wanted it to mean.

This is a gangster novel, I suppose, and I know gangster novels. It’s also a novel that stares right into the deepest questions we carry with us. Like only the very best literature, it does so without blinking.

This was long-listed for the Booker, but I see it isn’t a finalist. That’s a disappointment because I’m hard pressed to believe there’s a better novel that came out this year.


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