That Old Country Music

Starred review from August 1, 2020

Sit a spell with stories set in and around County Sligo, Ireland. Many of the characters here are solitary souls looking for some human connection--among them, a loner who becomes obsessed with a Polish waitress, a boarding school girl setting her sights on a local hermit with whom she plans to lose her virginity, and an old cop in his last weeks at work, determined to bring down a notorious reprobate. In "Who's-Dead McCarthy?" McCarthy is a grim reaper of a fellow who delights in stopping people in the street to impart news of any recent death, whether local or from the world at large. In the title story, about a small-time robbery gone awry, Barry layers surprise upon surprise as a pregnant 17-year-old awaits her fianc� in the getaway car. As may be expected, drink plays a prominent role in these stories, especially in "Toronto and the State of Grace," when a mother and son arrive near closing time at a nearly empty pub determined to work their way across an entire shelf of spirits while they regale the weary bartender with tales of their raucous lives. VERDICT The multi-award-winning Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) dazzles with his word wizardry and the effortless grace of his perfect sentences. Highly recommended.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 5, 2020
Irish writer Barry follows Night Boat to Tangier with a rather mixed story collection. “The Coast of Leitrim” and “Deer Season” tread well-worn romantic territories, depicting doomed and all-too familiar relationships. “Who’s-Dead McCarthy,” about a morbid townie chatterbox, is entertaining, yet it ends with a punch line that falls flat. On the other hand, the title story, which follows a pregnant teen as she waits for her criminal fiancé to return from a robbery, pulses with electricity and emotion, despite its abrupt conclusion. “Toronto and the State of Grace” showcases the author’s gift for dialogue and wit, as a brash son and his elderly mother hold court in a sleepy pub, drinking their way through the pub’s liquor and showering the barkeep with stories. And “Roma Kid” transforms what initially seems to be a depressing runaway child story into a fairy tale of finding family and purpose. As always, Barry can’t write a bad sentence (“A light rain began to fall and it spoke more than anything else of the place through which she moved”), but the too-tepid stories don’t do justice to the author’s considerable talents. This won’t go down as one of Barry’s finer works. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W.

November 15, 2020
Tales of love, lust, and country life by the gifted Irish writer. It's spring or summer in western Ireland in most of these 11 stories. The whitethorn--or hawthorn, which helps the heart, say herbalists--may be "decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch's wedding." And love appears throughout, romantic, familial, injurious, magical, morbid. A man drives away his lover for the painfully familiar reason that he can't imagine "what kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me." A young woman who targets a man to take her virginity before she returns to boarding school feels a new sense of power when he is run out of town. A man inherits a cottage that seems to make him irresistible to women, but while he's Don Juan under that roof, "elsewhere I was, as ever, a bag of spanners." A collector of old western Irish songs is startled by one in which a married woman seduces a herdsman so she can regale her husband with descriptions of her victim's besotted state. A pregnant 17-year-old waits in a van while her fiance is supposedly off robbing a gas station to finance their elopement, but here "the whitethorn blossom...made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind." Barry has the right stuff for short stories. He brings characters to life quickly and then blesses them with his uncanny ear for dialogue and prose rhythms, his compassion and wry wit. Most intriguing is one that opens with a dead whitethorn and has Theodore Roethke in an Irish psychiatric hospital (as he was in 1960), bantering with an earnest doctor while the poet's mordant interior monologue adds a subtext on madness and creativity. Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.

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January 1, 2021
Like Night Boat to Tangier (2019), Barry's beautiful tone poem of a novel, these 11 lyrical short stories, set mainly in the west of Ireland, are imbued with the melancholy of an Irish folk ballad, but that bone-deep sadness exists alongside pulsing, deeply felt life. Love treats Barry's characters roughly, leaving them ""deformed by desire"" and sending many of them into self-imposed isolation, where the ""drunk-making"" landscape of the West Country fuels their mood with poetry and sardonic wit. Even for those who appear to connect with a lover, like Seamus Ferris in ""The Coast of Leitrim,"" the strain of passion feels overwhelming: ""the torment of his happiness was on his brow like a bad fever."" It's no surprise that music, especially Irish ballads, would be central to stories populated with so many characters left shell-shocked by love. The searing melodies sometimes take center stage, as in ""Saint Catherine of the Fields,"" about a musicologist in search of lost songs, and sometimes play in the background, as in the title story in which Hannah, a pregnant teen waiting for her lover to return from robbing a gas station, muses on the disaster she knows is coming: ""The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the tune's circle and turn--it's the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.

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