Review: City of Bohane

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t help feeling as if Kevin Barry wrote this novel expressly for me. It’s a dystopic future in a small city of the west of Ireland where gangsters fight block by block for control. There are elements of the fantastic running throughout it, and there’s a vague critique of our own world for allowing the animal impulse to overwhelm what was once a seemingly civilized world.

Above all, though, this is an experiment in language and form. I’m not convinced it’s written in English, and that’s its ultimate magic. It comes at us with rhythms entirely its own. Years ago, a friend handed me the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian. My French was still pretty strong in those day, but I knew no Italian. Somehow, though, word by word, I found I understood what was before me.

This book gives that same feeling throughout. It’s never clear, for instance, whether Sweet Baba Jay is a new religious faith or simply a bastardized way of referring to Sweet Baby Jesus. At some point, though, it doesn’t matter. The rhythm of the phrase – occasionally abbreviated as SBJ – is sufficient to tell us what we need to know of the place it has in this Mad Max like world.

And that holds true sentence by sentence as well. You know enough of that’s going on to piece the full meaning together, and yet it never feels as if we are getting anything in conventional English – or even conventional Gael-English. It’s always original, always striking, and always intelligible.

Our main character is Logan, the albino boss of Hartnett’s Fancy, the dominant gang in most of the city of Bohane. He’s vicious but aging, and he faces an invasion by an eight-family alliance from a semi-suburban area as well as the return of an old rival, the Gant. What’s more, his beloved wife, Macu, may have fallen out of love with him, and there are young men itching to shoulder their way into greater authority.

Things do happen – the battle with the Cusack forces is ultimately compelling and nauseating – but much of the novel is descriptive. (Even that battle we get, cleverly, not through narrative but through a description of the photographs the leading newspaper photographer has taken and developed in his dark room.) There’s always something new for us to be told, and then there’s the adventure of the language in telling it.

It pains me to admit that, by the end, Barry seems to me to fall a bit short. [SPOILER: I’m especially disappointed to feel misled at the end when it turns out the Gant has returned not as a rival but as a secret ally who’s testing the loyalty of the young who might be challenging Logan. Plus, it’s no real surprise that Jenni emerges as the handpicked successor; she’s been the smartest and best positioned all along, so that reveal hardly seems compelling enough as a conclusion.]

Still, this one is worth it for the language and sense of dystopian wonder. I laughed routinely not so much at what happened nor at one-liners but at the audacious nature of the words that Barry makes dance for us.

One final reason to read this: I’d argue that Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier is probably the best novel – and certainly the best new novel – I read last year. This shows him testing what he can get away with on a creative but flawed canvas. By the time he moved on to Night Boat, he was a world-class writer. And, young as he is, I’m hoping there’s much more to come.


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