A quixotic, very Irish stylist, Kevin Barry ran rampant in his brilliant 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier (see my review), and his stopgap short story collection, That Old Country Music (see my review), kept us from pining too much for his latest novel, The Heart in Winter. And what a treat this latest gothic western is! In 1891, a doomed, druggy, handsome young Irishman, marooned in Butte, Montana, falls hard for the new bride, arrived from the big smoke, of the town’s fanatically religious mining overlord. The two of them purloin a horse and lurch westward in a blur of love and lust. Sent to kill one and return the other are a scarcely believable trio of vigilante Cornish horrors. The author’s stylistics are so, so Irish and overt that every paragraph is a pleasure to the readerly eye, and his grip on the doomed-lovers plot is ironclad. If The Heart in Winter might strike some as almost a step too far in terms of outlandishness, it is, nonetheless, a triumph of style and substance over mundanity, and a pleasure to read.
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