Welcome To Barrytown

Many journalists dream about jettisoning their day job and writing fiction for a living. But there comes a time in every hack’s life when he (or she) has to either shit or get off the plot. For Limerick-born Kevin Barry, freelance columnist and arts correspondent for various national broadsheets, that moment came just over a decade ago.

“I remember in the summer of 1999, I sat down and said, ‘Right, I’ve to get very poor for a while’,” the 41-year-old author recalls. “I didn’t want to have to make money to pay rent so I bought a caravan for £300 and lived down by a beach in Beara in West Cork. And over the course of that summer I wrote an absolutely fucking god-awful novel. It taught me an awful lot about the discipline that’s required.”
Although he remained an occasional member of the Fourth Estate, from that point on Barry concentrated most of his energies on honing his creative craft. “In some ways, journalism is an ideal job for a fiction writer because you’re using and honing a lot of the same muscles. But, in other ways, it’s the worst possible thing because you’re sapping those same energies. So I kind of phased out of journalism. I kept writing columns for the Irish Examiner and the Glasgow Herald until 2007, but those were quick columns that made me just enough to keep a roof over my head. But I’ve been writing fiction as my day job, if you like, since about 2001.”
He’s a fully paid-up subscriber to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes at least 10,000 hours of hard graft before you start getting any good at anything. “The horrible thing about writing for me is that you discover that all the clichés are true. The whole thing about it being 95% perspiration is very true. For a long time, especially in my twenties, I was very undisciplined. It tended to be late at night, after crawling in from nightclubs, hammered and stoned, and just scrawling down genius sentences. But those genius sentences weren’t cohering into genius stories, and you’d realise it in the cold sober light of morning.”
Initially he concentrated on short stories. Progress was relatively slow, publication was sporadic, and money was extremely tight. Luckily, he was blessed with a supportive partner (“she’s an academic and writes legal documents herself so she understands the process”). In 2007, his first collection There Are Little Kingdoms was published to uniformly rave reviews, winning that year’s Rooney Prize for Irish literature.
“The stories in the Little Kingdoms book came from quite a broad period – from about 1999 right up to when it came out in 2007. So that covered a great sweep of my life. I look around my office at home and I’ve got all these boxes full of notebooks and scrawling and half-bits of stories. There’s literally a lorry-load of stuff. And that has all been compressed down into one slim volume of stories, until the novel came out. So I haven’t been prolific yet.”
Four years on, his debut novel, City Of Bohane, has just been published. A cartoonish, richly imagined and exhilaratingly ultraviolent tale of warring crime gangs set in an isolated west of Ireland city forty years in the future, it seems set to cement Barry’s reputation as one of this country’s most interesting younger writers.
Following the rejection of a previous novel, Bohane came together very quickly. Working feverishly, writing 1,000 words a day, he produced the first draft in just twelve weeks. “I did a draft in three months, and then I spent another six months working over it. But I was very determined to get a draft of it together quickly. It wasn’t my first novel. I’d had two or three attempts that didn’t work out, and I’d spent fucking years on them. So when I decided to go again, I wanted to do it quickly.
“All told it took less than a year, which was pretty quick I suppose. It’s the only way I’d do a novel in future as well, as quickly as that, because I think one of the problems with novels is they’re a snapshot of the writer’s consciousness at the time. And if you spend years on it then you’re a very different person at the end than you were at the start. That can really affect the flow of a story. So for me, quick is the way to go with them.”
He says Bohane was influenced as much by TV, film, graphic novels and music as by anything in contemporary literature. The city’s memorable patois came from the scalpel sharp dialogue of shows like Deadwood, The Wire and The Sopranos.
“It’s very influenced not just by literature, but by stuff I’d been watching. And in a weird way, also by music. In the last few years I’ve had a recurring phase where I go back and listen to lots of dub reggae. Dig out the Trojan Records box sets and stuff. And I was listening to all this stuff writing Bohane and somehow this kind of influenced the feel of the book for me. Even though it was west of Ireland, it started to feel a bit like a grey-skied Kingston – it had a yard kind of a feel to it. And I was thinking a lot about what kind of music they’d be listening to in Bohane and I thought, ‘Okay, Trojan dub has survived into the 21st century’.”
Given these influences, it’s no surprise that the resulting book transcends traditional literature. City Of Bohane is one of those rare novels destined to be enjoyed by the kind of audience who don’t normally read books.
“I was at a literature festival in Toronto last year and I was reading with the American novelist Joshua Ferris. He was saying that he believes that the literary novel is going to have the same audience in ten years time that poetry has. I think as novelists we can’t really just stand by and let that happen. What has to happen is the novel has to become again a real arena for innovation. Any novel that I’m going to put my name to, I want it to say that there are still new things possible with this hoary old form.
“There are still new approaches,” he continues. “And for me innovation involves fucking around with the language, essentially. And we have a very wealthy resource close at hand in the way English is spoken in Ireland in its weird bastardised form. The way the register can go from tragedy to comedy, not just within the course of a story, but within the course of a sentence. It’s a uniquely rich instrument, I think, and it’s there for us to play about with. The novel has to get a bit wild again if people are to keep coming back to it.”

City of Bohane is published by Jonathan Cape.