“The Irish bastards were sentimental pigfuckers to a man.”

That’s Tom Rourke describing himself and his fellow countrymen who by the start of the 1890s had swapped their native land for the brave – and febrile – new world of Butte, Montana.

A writer-for-hire, opium fiend, booze hound and serial frequenter of Butte’s many brothels, Tom’s life is turned upside down by the arrival in town of Polly Gillespie, a mail-order bride from Chicago who’s agreed to marry self-flagellating, god-bothering mine manager, Long Harrington.

They’re just three of the larger-than-life protagonists in The Heart In Winter, the latest tome from Sligo-based author Kevin Barry, which documents what happens when Polly decides to dump her new husband and flee to San Francisco with Tom who – in order to finance their escape – steals $5,000 from the Croatian boarding house owner he’s already deeply in hock to.

That’s the cue for an epic get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge yarn which is equal parts Deadwood, The Hateful Eight, Bonnie And Clyde, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, The League Of Gentlemen and Badlands, more of which anon.

Although penned during lockdown, The Heart In Winter has its origins in a professional reccy the bould Mr. Barry made to Montana in 1999.

“I’d been working in Cork as a freelance journalist and decided, ‘The time has come to write your novel’,” he recalls. “Only trouble is I didn’t have a fucking clue what it was going to be about. The bits of fiction I was doing at the time were very much in the nightclubs, drugs and sex vein. Historical fiction wasn’t even remotely on my radar but during the summer I was out walking in the Beara Peninsula and came across the old Allihies copper mines.

“I did a bit of digging – metaphorically, not literally! – and discovered that a whole wave of miners emigrated during the latter part of the 1800s to Montana with the promise of good paying jobs. I thought, ‘Jesus, it’s a western with Cork accents!’ So, I wrote more newspaper and magazine features, saved up some money and in October ’99 flew Cork-London-Seattle. From there, I spent fourteen hours travelling to Butte on a Greyhound bus, which was a novel in itself.”

Has Butte hung on to its Irish feel?

“Oh, completely,” he nods. “It’s very proud of its Irish heritage and they have a big Paddy’s Day parade. There are Irish bars and when you show up with an actual Irish accent it’s free drinks for the night. You get more reserved as you get older but I wasn’t reserved when I was thirty, and literally stopped people in the street saying, ‘I’m writing a novel, what do you have for me?’

“I got given great stuff like letters written by copper miners in the 1890s and sent back home. I found my work diary from 1999 and in it were notes like, ‘See Norma Jean at the Blue Venus brothel’.”

And did he see her? For literary reasons, I hasten to add.

“Yeah, the Blue Venus had just closed after being in continuous use for over a century but was reopening as a brothel museum. Norma Jean took me down to the basement and showed me the cribs where the girls had originally worked. Most of the signs were written in Irish because a lot of the miners came from Gaeltachts and had no English. All the tricks were listed with everything index linked to a miner’s daily wage which was about $7. It was always a thing that a handjob couldn’t cost more than 15% of that. It was pure commerce in the raw.”

Returning home from his Butte sabbatical, Kevin started writing the multigenerational tale of emigrant Irish white supremacists. Several hundred pages in he realised it wasn’t working and abandoned manuscript.

“At the time I didn’t know how to reduce the story down,” he reflects. “I thought I had to do the mines, the brothels, the multi-generational bit, everything. When I went back to it a couple of years ago with more experience, I realised it could just be a story about lovers who’ve done something bad and have to get out of town. I knew they were called Tom and Polly and that he was Irish. I wrote Tom for a week going around the pubs, like in the first chapter. I thought, ‘This is promising, I’m getting some world-building into it’. Then, around twenty minutes into the second week, I knew I had a novel. I had a ball with it for a year. It’s the most fun I’ve had writing a book, I’d say.”

Does Kevin have a rough idea of how many books he’s started and then abandoned?

“There were definitely three before my first published novel, City Of Bohane. There was this one and another about a depressed poet. I was Taylor Swift before Taylor Swift! And then there was one that got close to being published about an Irish filmmaker who kills his wife in California or something. The bizarre thing is you spend years on them and I can’t even remember the fucking titles!”

TRIGGER WARNINGS

The Heart In Winter, it transpires, is a very different book to the one Kevin started writing during COVID.

“I’d been planning a novel about a stoner detective in Amsterdam in the early 1990s,” he reveals. “I thought it was a great fucking setup but when I started writing it, I was bored silly within a week. When I’ve got two or three competing ideas like that, I’ll try each one and see what gains a bit of momentum.”

The Heart In Winter’s finest set piece is when Tom and Polly go on a nocturnal magic mushroom trip in the wilderness with a couple of Mejité mixbloods. One suspects that Kevin is writing from personal experience.

“Absolutely, and it’s not my first attempt to write the magic mushroom scene,” he confirms. “It’s fucking hard to write a trip. That strange thing where you’re taken with colours and then start thinking about this really heavy stuff, as we did back in the day. It’s very hard to get that down on the page but finally I think I’ve got it.”

The “we” refers to the fact that myself and Mr. B used to sample the local fungi together when we were both struggling Limerick scribes.

“One of the things you never forget is the horror of that fucking slimy, mulchy mushroom tea,” he winces. “Looking back, there’s no guidebook when you’re a teenager saying, ‘Fifteen or twenty of these would probably do you fine’. I remember we’d eat hundreds of them. The most intense mushroom experience of my life was on Barrack Street in Cork in 1989. I was fully convinced I was a traffic light and just stood there for an hour and a half.”

A fierce publishing industry debate was sparked in April by Chocolat author Joanne Harris revealing that her next book will contain trigger warnings. Asked whether such warnings are necessary, Kevin says, “If you’re writing about incest or something equally horrendous perhaps, but not when it’s standard sex or violence. Books are supposed to shock and challenge. The main thing with The Heart In Winter is it’s a love story. I didn’t want to break the spell of that so while there is extreme violence in it, I was inclined to keep the violence off-screen.

“I’m not great at reading violence myself,” he continues. “I was asked to list my Top 10 Books of the Century and one of them was Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which is about the murder of women in Mexico. There’s a four hundred page section which, documentary-style, is just one murder after another and it’s hard, hard going. I found the Baby Reindeer thing quite difficult too.”

I could have done with a trigger warning for the passage on page 30 of The Heart In Winter when, in order to interrupt her husband’s coitus, Polly inserts a sausage casing filled with pig’s blood into her vagina. This pops to suitably gory effect when he attempts to consummate their marriage.

“The sausage casing trick was a known thing for young ladies who, usually for financial reasons, were forced into marrying older men they’d never met,” Kevin reflects. “Polly arrives in Butte genuinely thinking that she can knuckle down and be a good wife and mother, but then she meets Tom and knows she has to escape from Long Harrington. Her voice owes a lot to the Terence Malick films from the ‘70s, Badlands and Days Of Heaven. That kind of Sissy Spacek/Holly Sargis narration.”

Along with gynaecological peculiarities, Kevin’s research also unearthed lots of great period words. I’ve yet to fully ascertain what “She got the termuts for it” means but I think it’s intended as a compliment, albeit a bawdy one. Does Kevin have a favourite?

“Yeah, ‘morbs’ which was very common in England and France and crossed the Atlantic,” he enthuses. “A dose or fit of the morbs is getting into a blue, morose mood. I say that now in everyday life.

“Interestingly, ‘motherfucker’ – which is perhaps my favourite swear word – was in common use by the 1890s after gaining traction in the black neighbourhoods of Chicago. Young men were also being referred to as ‘dudes’, so both are in the book.”

A FORM OF MAGIC

Kevin said earlier that The Heart In Winter is the most fun book he’s ever written. It’s also the most autobiographical with Tom Rourke’s similarities to the author not confined to his magic mushroom taking.

“It’s not coincidental that he’s thirty in the book which is the age I was when I went to Butte,” Kevin confirms. “He’s a young literary man. Literary ambition at that age is a very elevated and ennobled condition. It’s also a complete fucking disaster!”

Tom derives his meagre living from the ballads he’s commissioned to write by bar and mine owners; penning letters to prospective brides on behalf of illiterate men; and working as a photographer’s assistant.

“What’s interesting about 1891 is that for the first time in human history, very ordinary people are starting to think about how they look because of the photographic studios that are opening in every town. One of the reasons Polly is attracted to Tom is his clothes, which he’s very aware of himself. It’s an early iteration of Instagram.”

The fiction in The Heart Is Winter may be historical but many of its themes are applicable still.

“One of the cool things about writing this book was reminding myself and ourselves that we’re a nation of economic refugees,” Kevin reflects. “We’ve gone around the world’s four corners expecting to be taken in. And we’ve always been treated well and done well. I’ve been an economic refugee in my time, going off to England for work in the ‘90s. It’s dreadfully fucking hypocritical when you see the stuff that’s going on here now in relation to migrants. What’s really interesting is that when local politicians have called to the door and I’ve asked them, ‘What are people worried about?’, they’ve said two things: housing and the cost of childcare. No one is fucking worried about immigration. It’s false culture war bollocks, played up by people trying to bring in all that American bullshit. It’s clickbait nonsense.”

Kevin admits to having conflicted views about the States.

“I love America but the inequality is so fucking stark,” he proffers. “I was over recently and they’re trying to keep homeless people off the Greyhounds by making it impossible to buy a ticket without having an app on your phone. You have extremely wealthy people leading extremely nice lives and then, only a few blocks away, you see the poor guys living out of shopping trollies with no access to services. They’re just gathering up the homeless and pushing them even further out into the margins.”

Kevin was in Dublin recently recording the audiobook version of The Heart In Winter.

“I had to lean in to quite a few accents. And I tell you now, my Cornish is a fucking disgrace. I’m quite pleased with my Reverend character. He’s a Yorkshire man, so I did him as Mick McCarthy.”

American trade bible Variety broke the news last year that Kevin’s last full-length tome, Night Boat To Tangier, is being turned into a film with The Theory Of Everything man James Marsh directing and Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Fassbender and Ruth Negga sharing top billing.

“You couldn’t wish for a better cast,” he enthuses. “The script is written so my bit is done. I think they have finance so it’s down to actors’ schedules and trying to make them collide, which is a form of magic. I’m just waiting for the white smoke to appear from the balcony.

“A film version of The City Of Bohane is at quite an advanced stage with an American animation company called School Of Humans. They had a World War II thing, The Liberator, on Netflix which was great. Their idea is to have actual actors but in a drawn world. If it were a live action film it’d cost fifty million to build a future Irish city. This is a way of doing it for less than ten. I think it’ll look very cool.”

HORRIBLE NEW TENSIONS

Whether it’s the Irish ballads that soundtrack The Heart In Winter; the Trojan beats and Calypso rhythms floating around The City Of Bohane; the obscure Microdisney references in Nightboat To Tangier or Beatlebone’s reimagining of John Lennon, Kevin’s writing has always had a musical flavour. This could explain why one of his biggest US fans is Donald Fagen of Steely Dan renown and the love shown to him by Fontaines D.C. who pass his books around their tour bus.

“Yeah, I saw them talking about that in an interview,” he enthuses. “I think we’re coming from a lot of the same places. John Francis Flynn was very complimentary too. The folk revival has got great kudos and rightly so. It’s also great to see artists like CMAT and Junior Brother breaking through. Every community in Ireland now has its own DIY hip hop community. The country’s changing in a very rapid, exciting way. Hip hop is always great for transmitting the news and addressing all those fucking horrible new tensions as well. Twenty years ago, you could have said, ‘Ireland culturally is this, this and this’ but now it’s so diverse you can’t stick any labels on it.”

Tom Rourke couldn’t have said it better himself.

• The Heart In Winter is published by Canongate.