“I have severe ones,” John says, “but I do need a room.” Towards the end, a startling interlude complicates and deepens the novel’s impact. Dialogue is sharp: “Do you have a reservation?” asks a “hatchet-faced crone”. But John is being pursued by a gaggle of journalists he’s got no idea which of the 365 islands on the horizon is his the radio won’t stop playing Kate Bush and his plans keep getting diverted by Cornelius O’Grady – part manager, part spiritual guide – who is meant to be helping, but spends his time guzzling black pudding while watching The Muppets.Īs John grows desperate, the ebullient O’Grady masterminds a picaresque frenzy, encompassing a trip to an Irish pub in a dead man’s clothes, a stay with the sinister Community of the Black Atlanteans and a night in a lonely cave, where John is left to recite in whimpers the numbers of Liverpool buses to calm his nerves.Īs ever, Barry’s writing is a joy: full of bad weather and bad language, black humour and striking images – a dingy hotel, for example, “smells of mouse and yesteryear”. Its set-up is ostensibly straightforward, in John’s mind at least: “I just want to get to my island,” he repeats. Read: Sinatra, Dylan and Grace Jones: the best music biographies of 2015.The author of two acclaimed short story collections, Kevin Barry won the 2013 Impac award for his debut novel, City of Bohane, and this month Beatlebone received the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. That he might scream his f-ing lungs out and scream the days into nights and scream to the stars by night – if stars there are and the stars come through.” “He will spend three days alone on his island.

His purpose: to divest his soul of suffering by an intense and solitary session of primal scream therapy. John – though we’re left for most of the book to work this out – is John Lennon his destination is Dorinish, the island off the west coast of Ireland which he bought in 1967. It’s May of 1978, and John, 37, is hurtling in a black Mercedes down a dark road, cocooned in a sadness “like a damp and second skin”.

Beatlebone book review