‘Roma Kid’ by Kevin Barry

A gypsy child leaves ‘the chalets of the asylum park’ next to one of the frantic arteries that serve Dublin and she walks and trains across Ireland until she is taken in by a strange anchorite, a ‘ferny, mossy, twisted old thing’ who takes her with him into his trailer in the woods. Barry’s language, as always, is astounding, his grasp of concision and of what is best to leave unsaid is exemplary. Something bad is going to happen here, you’ll be thinking, and your nerves will be tautened, zinging, waiting for that badness to come down. Does it? Well, on finishing this story, my beam could’ve been seen from space. I hovered three feet off the ground.

First published in The New Statesman, then The Berlin Quarterly, and collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

‘Ernestine and Kit’ by Kevin Barry

We will begin and end this collection with fictional women who are in late middle age, like me. Ernestine and Kit are “in their sixties”, respectable and judgemental, with wittily well-observed dialogue.

“The skirt’s barely down past her modesty, are you watching?”

They are taking a drive on a summer’s day through County Sligo in Ireland, visiting some tourist attractions.

“As the engine cut the car filled with the sound of anxious birds and the nearby chatter of the castle visitors. For a moment, the ladies pleasantly listened – they did love a summer-afternoon crowd.”

But the reason why they love a crowd is not what the reader might expect. What opens as a light read with a little social commentary, soon takes a turn which makes it much funnier and much darker. ‘Ernestine and Kit’ greatly rewards a reread, when phrases which might have seemed ordinary will take on more meaning.

Researching for this anthology, I discovered that there is a ten-minute film of ‘Ernestine and Kit’ directed by Simon Bird, starring Pauline Collins. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it available to watch anywhere, but I have high hopes for it when I do.

First published in Columbia Journal Issue No. 49, 2011. Collected in Dark Lies The Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012

‘The Mainland Campaign’ by Kevin Barry

A story that doesn’t clearly lay everything out neatly for the reader. We know from the title, and from a few brief references in the text that we are following a young Irishman planning a bomb attack on Camden Town tube station at some point in the 1980s. Chris Power, reviewing the parent collection for the Guardian, compared it unfavourably with William Trevor, as “Steven’s motives remain unexplored.”

Much as I hesitate to disagree with such a knowledgeable commentator, for me that is actually a strength of this as storytelling. Barry’s use of close third person POV gives us a slight distance from his protagonist, but we are in Steven’s world, seeing it his way. Taking his minder’s admonishment to not get “emotional” about his task, he is as focused on his new German girlfriend and their possible life together (rather romantically imagined in Steven’s head) as on his mission. The horror of the scenario is not ignored -contemplating his potential victims, we see Steven think “They were his own kind, and if that was proof of cold valour, what was?” – but neither is it laid on with a melodramatic trowel. There is suspense: to borrow Hitchcock’s definition, we literally see the bomb being left under the market bookstall, although the story has finished before it is scheduled to go off. We see no explosion or human carnage: we are not in Jed Mercurio territory here.

The shock is not so explicit. It may be a perverse and twisted place to us, but we are in Steven’s ‘normal’ here. It is our error to assume that it follows the same logic and framework as ours – we will, I hope, not be bombing the people we danced alongside last night – and the withholding of a clear explanation makes the story all the more chilling. Answering the question ‘how has this young man come to be this way?’ is complicated, especially if we stand back (in time as much as geography) to contemplate responsibility.

Published in Dark Lies the Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012

‘Fjord of Killary’ by Kevin Barry

“So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbour wall, with Mweelrea mountain across the water, and disgracefully grey skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.”

My most joyful reading experiences have sprung from the pages of Kevin Barry, to my mind the greatest short story writer at work today. If ever I need to reignite my love for reading and writing, I return to his second collection, Dark Lies the Island, and in particular to ‘Fjord of Killary’, a raucous story set at the Water’s Edge hotel bar.

“The people of this part of north Galway are oversexed,” says the narrator. “I had found a level of ribaldry that bordered on the paganistic.” The narrator is the owner of the hotel and a poet with creative block. His nine Belarusian bar staff are in varying degrees of sexual contact, his sleepless nights filled with “the sound of their rotating passions”.

Serving the locals Bushmills whiskey and Guinness stout, the hotel owner admonishes John Murphy, an “alcoholic funeral director” for leering at the “rear quarters of Nadia” the barmaid. “You’d do jail time for that,” says John while Mick Harty, “distributor of bull semen for the vicinity” grinds against his “enormously fat wife, Vivien”.

‘Fjord of Killary’ is set on a Bank Holiday Monday, “among the wettest bank holidays ever witnessed”. Outside the bar, the waters of Ireland’s only natural fjord rise up the harbour walls while dogs howl and a pair of minks head for the fields. Unlike the animals, the locals stay put, drinking at a quickened pace while the rain intensifies.

Barry’s love of language glitters in every sentence of this tragicomic masterpiece. Funny and poignant, ‘Fjord of Killary’ is rich with themes of ageing, creativity and pleasure.

First published in The New Yorker, 2010. Collected in Dark Lies the Island, Vintage, 2013. Read it online here

‘The Coast of Leitrim’ by Kevin Barry

I don’t know if the word “delightful” is a good enough word to describe something you love, but when I first read this story I grinned like a fool from beginning to end. I’ve just read it again and I’m still smiling. Seamus isn’t the exile in this story, but Katherine is – a young woman from Poland working in a cafe in Carrick. They are both lonely and a bit lost, but they work through their awkwardness to accommodate each other’s failings – his weak chin and her lumpy knees – and find a way to make reality live with their ideals. Much of the humour of the story is in the language and the telling, and that’s enough to make it irresistible. But it also plays some very clever games with the conventions of romance, undercutting them at every stage with the rituals of everyday life – shopping in Lidl, stalking an Instagram account. They lose each other of course, and after a modern version of a romantic quest, by google maps and a cheap flight to Wroclaw, Seamus finds her again. When he walks into the last internet cafe in Europe where Katherine is the only customer, she sees him and says, “Oh, thanks be to fuck”, and you know they’ll be alright.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2018, and available to read and listen to here. Collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

‘Extremadura’ by Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry is the writer everyone wants to write like. I came across his work during lockdown and couldn’t get enough. The dialect, the darkness, the lyricism. He’s a literary trickster extraordinaire. You read one Barry and you want to read them all. Then all over again.

‘Extremadura (Until Night Falls)’ has at its centre a typical Barry character, a man who has landed in Spain, fleeing his Irish family ties, escaping his life. As often is the case, there’s a dog, a girl, and a melancholy heart. But familiar characters aside, there’s nothing ordinary about Kevin Barry’s dark Spanish tale. It pounds with the heartbeat of the west of Ireland.

First published in That Old Country Music, Canongate 2020

‘Animal Needs’ by Kevin Barry

I often give Kevin Barry’s books to pals who don’t read much. They love him, and so do I. This story, from his first collection, is absolutely mad. The central character, John Martin, a farmer and remorseful swinger whose chicken operation is under inspection, spends the day driving around town in a state of existential desperation. It’s hysterical, and features many such lines as “He didn’t know how he finished that sausage sandwich but by Jesus he finished it.” But the brilliant thing about Barry is the way he sneaks in the devastating lines, too: “You imagine the whole wife-swapping business would take four decisions but really it only takes three.” Oh God.

First published in There are Little Kingdoms, Stinging Fly, 2007

‘Across the Rooftops’ by Kevin Barry

I could select any number of Kevin Barry stories for the joy they create from his use of language. Here, an unnamed twentysomething narrator wrestles with himself as he tries to figure out how to make the first move on a young woman he has desired for at least three months which for him seems an eternity. The story is filmic and the camera is close up, so close that we see the “opaque down of her bare arms, each strand curling like a comma at its tip.” After a kiss that doesn’t take, the young woman leaves and his heart opens and takes in “every black poison the morning could offer.”

From Dark Lies the Island, Graywolf Press/Jonathan Cape, 2012. Available to read online at pen.org

‘Who’s-Dead McCarthy’ by Kevin Barry

A friend told me recently that whenever her mother phones, her small child pipes up, “Who’s dead?” and it’s true that the litany of the dead and the dying is increasingly the subject of conversation. Our deeply Irish interest in the details of others’ deaths (what I like to think of as the Who-By-Fire of it all) is brought to bold and brilliant life here, reminding us that this is neither nostalgia nor maudlin, but a noticing of people, a marking of who they were and the lives they led.

Con McCarthy is the local “connoisseur of death”, a figure of dread and fun, in his “enormous, suffering overcoat”. When pressed, Con says he finds death impressive – it is the one question we will all be asked yet to which “not one of us can make the report after”. The story shines in the darkly funny specifics of the deaths described, which put us on the side of the narrator, leaving poor Con alone carries the burden of ridicule and remembering.

When we are gone from memory, the story insists, then we are really gone.

The story appeared online in the Irish Times on 1 January 2020 and is collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020