City of Bohane

November 21, 2011
Barry’s debut novel, a near-future noir, takes readers on a walking tour of Bohane, an apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland’s west coast. One of its seedier precincts, the Back Trace, is ruled by underworld boss Logan Hartnett of the Hartnett Fancy gang, who governs like an Irish Don Corleone. But the graying Hartnett finds his power threatened when his rival, the Gant Broderick, returns after a 25-year absence. Hartnett also has to cope with an upstart gang, the Cusacks, that wants to take over the Trace. To make matters worse, his wife, Macu, who is also the Gant’s former lover, wants him to give up the life. And finally, tough Fancy girl Jenni Ching, a “saucy little ticket” with a “pack of feral teenage sluts at her beck ’n’ call in the Bohane Trace,” may be playing both ends against the middle. How Hartnett handles these various crises forms the dramatic core, but with so many literary influences running through it, the novel reads as if China Miéville and Irvine Welsh had collaborated to update Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Although this sort of future-shock noir is nothing new and the elliptical narrative peters out before it reaches its inconclusive climax, the author succeeds with a continual barrage of hybrid language reminiscent of Anthony Burgess at his A Clockwork Orange best.

December 15, 2011
Gangland warfare rules the day in an imagined, decivilized Irish city. Roll up Joyce, Dickens, Anthony Burgess and Marty Scorsese, sprinkle with a dash of Terry Gilliam, and smoke up. That's roughly the literary experience to be had from ingesting this marvelously mashed-up creation from Irish storyteller Barry (There Are Little Kingdoms, 2007). The author goes for broke in constructing his fictional City of Bohane, a once-great city on the west coast of Ireland that has taken 40 years to fall into utter decay. The setting is a rich stew of ethnicities, loyalties, gangster cred, vices and technologically barren conflicts. Different provinces promise different pleasures: parallel streets in New Town, barely controlled chaos in the Back Trace, fetish parlors and shooting galleries in Smoketown, all behind the moat of the Big Nothin'. Pulling the strings on this criminality is Logan Hartnett, a gaunt, pale rake called "The Albino." Hartnett is beleaguered by harpy wife Immaculata and protected by a trio of young warriors: ambitious Wolfie Stanners, irrepressible Fucker Burke and razor-cool Jenni Ching, who works all sides with equal aplomb. A "welt of vengeance" threatens to jump off, after a Cusack of the Rises gets "Reefed" in Smoketown. Make sense? Much like the fiction of Irvine Welsh, the vernacular takes some acclimatization. Stirring the pot is the fact that Hartnett's mortal enemy, "The Gant Broderick," has sashayed back into town. "Halways pikey, halfways whiteman. Been gone outta the creation since back in the day. Was the dude used to have the runnins before the Long Fella. Use' t'do a line with the Long Fella's missus an' all, y'check?" explains Wolfie in his messy patois. The familiar gangland drama won't come as any great surprise, pulling in traces of pulp fiction, cop flicks and the grittier dystopian films into its gravity, but its style is breathlessly cool. Barry's addictive dialect and faultless confidence make this volatile novel a rare treat.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2011

Set in an urban Irish dystopia of the future, this is the story of Logan Hartnett, leader of the Fancy Boys gang, who controls crime in Smoketown, a sleazy quarter of the gritty City of Bohane. A love triangle frames the story, as rival Gant Broderick returns to reclaim his old girlfriend Macu, but the real action in this book is violent--neighborhood turf wars, contract killings, and cycles of score settling. The city's fate seems to hang on the whims of these fairly stock main characters; other citizens hang on their words, gossip about their intentions, and act as a cartoonish chorus to this gangster opera. Barry (There Are Little Kingdoms) creates a retro world of quasi-Victorian fashion where "blades" are prized but guns, cars, and cell phones do not exist. VERDICT On display, even more than the strutting characters' fashion sense, is the author's virtuosic writing: he has created a unique vernacular of Irish speech patterns mixed with Caribbean terms, delivered in a breathless, conversational style. This hybrid will be of interest both to fantasy and to literary fiction readers.--John R. Cecil, Texas State Lib. & Archives Commission, Austin

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2011
What strange and dangerous glamor first-time novelist Barry of Dublin conjures on the rough streets of the city of Bohane, which hulks and shudders on the banks of a poisoned river bounded by a vast patchwork of bogs called the Big Nothin'. It takes a few pages to acclimate to the vivid argot of this past-its-glory city, but soon its seductive music lures you forward as you try to suss out the tricky relationships among its scheming characters. Out walking alone late at night, the elegantly attired Logan, or Long Fella, head of the gang Hartnett Fancy, breathes in the sweet badness of Bohane, a scent that permeates this ravishing carnival of obsession and betrayal, intoxication and crime, blood oaths, power grabs, and gang warfare. When Logan's old rival, the Gant, dares to return, everyone in Bohane braces for a showdown. With escalating suspense and wonder, we watch Logan's dapper young warriors engage in gory action; puzzle over secretive Girly, Logan's bedridden old mum; and cautiously admire Jenni Ching, sleek and deadly in sprayed-on vinyl. Although Barry has set this bewitching, stylized noir pageant of underworld dynastic upheaval in the grim near-future, it has a timeless air, with spookily beautiful evocations of ancient Irish mythology and an elegiac sense of civilization's attenuation while the old, bred-in-the-bones urges are resurgent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)