Heart in Winter: Kevin Barry on his new 'Western with Cork accents' (2024)

“I had decided the time had come for my novel,” he says, laughing heartily at the grandiosity of his pronouncement.

“I wrote a load of features for the Examiner and did a few shifts on The Echo. I saved up some money and I had three months when I didn’t have to do any freelancing. I went down to Allihies and I had a caravan down by the beach. I didn’t have a laptop or anything, I had my notebooks and I was kind of, ‘what do I write a novel about?’ I hadn’t a notion. I’d be going for walks around the place and looking at the old copper mines. I knew a lot of the locals who had worked there had gone to Montana. I thought that was kind of good.”

He decided his book would be “a Western with Cork accents” and continued his research. He wrote more features and saved up again, this time for a trip to Butte, where he headed that October.

“It was my first trip to the US, I flew to Seattle and I got on a Greyhound bus for something like 14 hours to Butte. I had a ball there, they were lovely. It’s still very Irish — when you show up with an actual accent from Ireland, they’re like, ‘oh, Jesus’. I got rakes of great material.”

The stage was set for Barry’s grand opus but while the spark of an idea was there, the execution of it proved a bit more challenging. “I went back to Cork and tried to write the novel and I hadn’t a clue how to do it.

I wrote more than 100,000 words — it is around in a box somewhere. I had great atmosphere but I had nothing really in terms of characters. I’d say I spent probably six or seven months forlornly attempting it and then just thought, ‘nah, f*ck it, try something else.’ And around that time I started to write short stories in a serious way. I more or less forgot about Butte, Montana, except as a kind of an anecdote that I would trot out.”

Writing short stories proved to be the ideal vehicle for Barry’s talents, his debut collection There Are Little Kingdoms getting him noticed straight out of the traps, laying the ground for an acclaimed body of work. His Western languished in the depths of his imagination, until the pandemic.

“In October 2021, I started a novel about a stoner detective in Amsterdam who does all his investigations by fax machine. I gave it about a week and it was f*cking desperate sh*t altogether. I was just bored by it, and I thought, ‘what am I going to do now for a novel?’ I thought, ‘Butte, Montana’, maybe its time is now.”

The characters that had previously eluded him appeared in the form of Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie. Rourke is from ‘the far side of Berehaven’ and lasts three hours down the mines before turning his talents to writing letters for the denizens of Butte to prospective wives. Polly arrives in Butte newly married to another Beara man, the mine captain Long Anthony Harrington, but when she meets Tom, their fate is sealed.

“I had always wanted to write runaway lovers,” says Barry. “So I gave it two weeks and I tried him for a week. He’s an awful disaster of a young fella, and as I was following him around the town, I was getting some of the world building going on in what felt like quite a natural way. In the second week, I started writing it in Polly’s voice and in about 20 minutes, I said: ‘I have a book’. And then I had a very enjoyable year with it. It was just great craic to get into the whole set-up of a Western. They’re very kind to you when you write them. They naturally suggest momentum and plot because people are forever hopping onto horses and just heading off.”

Barry acknowledges many other influences on the book (he even gets in a reference to a Nirvana song) but one of the most obvious is the HBO series Deadwood, a filthy, baroque, and often hilarious Western from the pen of David Milch, which brought us the unforgettable, and suitably named, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane).

“I remember when I saw it first, about 2006, I thought, ‘that’s how you do your f*cking Butte, Montana novel’. It’s a toss-up between that and Mad Men for the all-time best TV programme. The Sopranos is up there but Deadwood is out on its own for the way it uses a completely made-up take on what they sounded like in these western towns, this Elizabethan Shakespearean register that is completely inauthentic to the time but just works.”

The language of The Heart in Winter is equally vibrant and fruity, albeit delivered with a Cork accent.

“The profanity in something like Deadwood, that feels right for copper miners from Co Cork in bars. They’re not speaking drawing room English in the 1890s. I felt I could tune into it well enough. I remembered a lot of the stuff I had still from 25 years ago. So all the bars, cafés and brothels that are named, they all existed. The Irish crowd in Butte, it was mainly Co Cork they came from — they were 10,000 of the 30,000 there until 1891. If you look at the community, how it formed itself there, the first thing they did was they opened 38 pubs, then they took over the police, then the political apparatus in the town, and that was the MO in all the Irish cities in America.”

The obvious resonances the book has today are not lost on Barry. Butte and the other frontier towns featured are places where desperate people do what they need to get by in desperate circ*mstances.

“The diaspora is a great thing for us as writers because we f*ck off everywhere for centuries — economic refugees, that’s what we are, that’s what we’ve always been. I’ve been an economic refugee, going to England in the early ‘90s for work. It’s important to remind ourselves that is what and who we are. You get this talk, ‘well, we worked so hard’. I was involved in every scam going when I was in London, I was a complete messer as were all the Limerick and Cork people who I used to hang around with. But yeah, it does stick in the craw when you hear the anti-immigration stuff.”

Given its subject material, it wouldn’t be giving away too much to say that The Heart in Winter may elicit tears, not something that could routinely be said for Barry’s previous work. “I think the ‘feels’, as the young people call them, come through in the end. It’s kind of heartbreaking. I was moved by it myself,” he says. Part of the sadness was also having to say goodbye to Tom and Polly.

“For a year I was totally residing in Tom and Pollyland and I was having a ball — I was up to my eyes in this romance. I was going out to my desk quite happily, hopping out of bed in the morning, which isn’t the usual kind of way. I was sad that they were gone. I missed them.”

And there it is, the story of Kevin Barry’s horse opera. We will have to leave the rest of the stories for another day, like the one about Yank Harrington, the 99-year-old who Barry was brought to see in Butte; born there, his parents returned to Beara when he was a child, and he reminisced about lighting fires to warn locals of the approach of the Black and Tans during the War of Independence. He later returned to Montana in his 20s and stayed there for the rest of his life.

“He told me loads of stories and he got his fiddle out and was playing all these Irish songs. It was fantastic stuff, but yeah, it’s crazy the amount of people who have stories as soon as word gets out. Roddy Doyle sent me an email telling me his grandmother’s sister was a saloon keeper in Butte in the 1920s. Then a friend of mine in Cork told me about his great-great uncle who was a doctor in Butte, but had to leave when he was accused of murder.”

One for a sequel, perhaps? “I don’t know, I’d love it but I’m always wary about follow-ups. It does feel like great real estate.”

• The Heart in Winter, published by Canongate, is published on June 6. Kevin Barry will be reading at Waterstones, Cork at 6.30pm on Wed, Jun 19. He will also be appearing with Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses, at the National Learning Network in Bantry as part of the West Cork Literary Festival at 2.30pm on Thurs, Jul 18. www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie

Kevin Barry: A Question of Taste

Reading: I just finished Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. She got her diaries from 15 years and fed them into a kind of a database, took all the sentences out of it alphabetically and edited it. It’s a unique kind of book.

Listening to: I go in and out of hip-hop phases all the time. I’ve also been listening to the new St Vincent record which I’m kind of lukewarm with. Having watched a recent documentary on TG4, I downloaded the Bothy Band, their first two albums, it's fantastic stuff, so that’s been going on out in the shed. I also had a whole playlist put together for this book. I was trying to get some stuff slightly resonant of the era, so I started listening to Count John McCormack quite a bit.

Best recent gig: I’ve been to f*ck-all because I'm living in a swamp in Co Sligo. I’m going to see Patti Smith in Vicar St in June. I’ve seen her outdoors so I’m really looking forward to seeing her in a relatively small indoor venue.

TV: I’m struggling with the telly lately, a lot of it is drifting past me now. I do always watch Selling the OC on Netflix. I’ve been very much enjoying season three. I see it as a kind of a philosophical show in lots of ways. I watch it for the West Coast scenery as well.