I begin each reading year curious about which will be the first truly great book I stumble across and how long I’ll have to wait before that happens and this year I’m lucky: less than a month of 2020 has elapsed and I’ve already encountered Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, his third novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and as I’m turning the last page I’m wondering to myself how the judges could have had the hearts or minds to dismiss it from the running. It was a good longlist, I get that, a strong set of interesting books. Half of it had to be dispensed with, one way or another, but even so.
Night Boat to Tangier is not just a book about two Irish ex-gangsters. It’s a book about freedom and imprisonment, love (of course), exhaustion, despair, mental illness, the iron grip of history and personal trauma. Magic and folklore. Landscape, landscape and landscape. Poetry – because Night Boat to Tangier is an epic poem. If the definition – or a definition – of a work of art is a conceived artifact that is at one and the same time dreadfully specific yet utterly universal then Night Boat to Tangier is a work of art. (I keep thinking about John Banville, that quote of his just after he won the Booker about it being about time a work of art took the prize. I love it when writers come out with stuff they shouldn’t.)
Night Boat to Tangier fits wholly, sublimely into the song-tradition of Irish writing. But the feeling it gives me as I finish reading is – illogically, incongruously, absolutely – the same feeling I get reading or seeing a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Barry’s interpolation of magical elements into his text is the capstone of genius and I am coming to think that Barry must be a magician. At the very least, he reminds us with every sentence why writing matters. A book to sear the heart and thrill the mind.