Speaker 1: I love the writing of Irish author Kevin Barry, from
Speaker 1: his first novel, The Impact Dublin Literary Award winning City
Speaker 1: of Boham, through his collections of short stories to night
Speaker 1: Boats to Tangier and last year's The Heart in Winter.
Speaker 1: Any year where there's a new Kevin Barry book is
Speaker 1: a year where Kevin Barry book will be amongst my
Speaker 1: favorite things I read. He's funny and somehow both sharp
Speaker 1: and blunt. Every sentence in a Kevin Barry story is
Speaker 1: carefully calibrated and perfectly weighted, but not in a way
Speaker 1: that feels tricksy or labored. There's this breezy playfulness that
Speaker 1: means that even when he's writing Menace or Melancholy or
Speaker 1: Doomed Lovers, as you're reading, you're moved by the poetry
Speaker 1: of his sentences and carried by the dark wit of
Speaker 1: his ever present humor. He's just great. He is not
Speaker 1: unusually for read this yet another writer from that Irish tradition,
Speaker 1: but with him you can also see the debts to
Speaker 1: other literature, to theatre, to TV and sina. I was
Speaker 1: reading this interview he did with the Paris Review that
Speaker 1: noted that night Boat to Tangier had this palpable debt
Speaker 1: to Beckett. The central conceit of that book is two
Speaker 1: Irish friends sitting at a dock in Spain, waiting for
Speaker 1: a ship that might never arrive, as they spin stories
Speaker 1: and bicker and hang shit on one another. The Becket
Speaker 1: link is absolutely there, but just as quickly, the Paris
Speaker 1: Review interview moves on to the Jonathan Glazer film Sexy Beast,
Speaker 1: then to Harold Pinter before long, Barry's bringing in Twin
Speaker 1: Peaks and listening to the Pixies, and Saw Bellow, then
Speaker 1: Flannery O'Connor, all these influences one after another, all of
Speaker 1: them and many more besides. But together they combine to
Speaker 1: create something that is singularly itself. I'd happily talk to
Speaker 1: him about any topic at any length. But it's his
Speaker 1: latest book, The Heart in Winter, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: books of last year, that is our focus today. It's
Speaker 1: another masterpiece, brief and efficient and all the things that
Speaker 1: he does best. This time around, It's a Western, and
Speaker 1: it's a love story, a couple running from misdeeds and
Speaker 1: towards the thrilling possibility of a new life together. It's
Speaker 1: his seventh book. But also the first idea for a
Speaker 1: novel that he ever had, and one that he began
Speaker 1: researching more than twenty five years ago. From Schwartz Media.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Williams, and this is read This the show
Speaker 1: about the books we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1: I think maybe the logical place to kick off and
Speaker 1: far bit from me to cast dispersions in anyone else's
Speaker 1: speed of production between research and writing, But a quarter
Speaker 1: of a century feels like a decent time lag between
Speaker 1: starting an idea and executing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a slow game sometimes writing fiction, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we are referring listeners to my most recent novel, The
Speaker 2: Heart and Winter, which is my seventh published book of fiction,
Speaker 2: But it was the first one I attempted as a
Speaker 2: very you can imagine as an extremely young man in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine. I was twenty nine. Actually I wasn't
Speaker 2: that young, but no. I was working in Cork City
Speaker 2: in Ireland as a freelancing as a journalist and just
Speaker 2: had this kind of itch throughout fiction which was only
Speaker 2: really been itched about four in the morning, after I'd
Speaker 2: crawl home from a nightclub on all fours, you know,
Speaker 2: and those sentences would have to burnish of certain genius
Speaker 2: at four in the morning, but somehow wouldn't stand up
Speaker 2: to the sober light of day. And I knew I
Speaker 2: had to get serious and I really had to put
Speaker 2: the work in. So I saved up all this money
Speaker 2: for my freelancing, and I had three months. I bought
Speaker 2: myself three months, and I went to the Court coast
Speaker 2: and I put a little caravan on a beach, and
Speaker 2: I said, right time to write that novel, young man.
Speaker 2: You know. I had that classic twenty nine year old
Speaker 2: hard chat with myself. Time now, you know, attend to
Speaker 2: your pros, sir. So I went out and I brought
Speaker 2: up I didn't even have a laptop at the time.
Speaker 2: I don't think I had no books that I started,
Speaker 2: and I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing to write about,
Speaker 2: you know. And I was just going for these long, bitter,
Speaker 2: tormented walks around the Cahab Mountains in West Cork, and
Speaker 2: one day, just passing the old copper mines up there,
Speaker 2: taught that's interesting abandoned copper minds and reading into the
Speaker 2: story a little bit in local histories and finding out
Speaker 2: that all the miners had moved to Butte Montana in
Speaker 2: the eighteen eighties when the copper minds in Ireland played
Speaker 2: out and Butte was booming because they were electrifying America
Speaker 2: and there was a rush on copper. So I thought,
Speaker 2: my god, here it is a Western with Irish accents.
Speaker 2: You know, this is mine. Like I was reading an
Speaker 2: unseemly amount of Cormack McCarthy books at the time as well,
Speaker 2: so this was all feeding into it. So I said,
Speaker 2: all you have to do now, young Feller, is get
Speaker 2: yourself to but My It was my first trip to
Speaker 2: the US. Actually, in October ninety nine. I flew to
Speaker 2: Seattle and got on a Greyhound bus for about fourteen years,
Speaker 2: I think it took to get out to debut and
Speaker 2: had a royal time for a week there. The city
Speaker 2: is very proud of its Irish heritage and welcomed me
Speaker 2: with open arms. And I was very direct and forward
Speaker 2: at that age. I was going up to everybody in
Speaker 2: bars and on the street and listen, now, I'm writing
Speaker 2: a novel about this place. What have you got for me?
Speaker 2: You know? And they were lovely.
Speaker 3: They were really kind, and they fed me and brought
Speaker 3: me drinking, and brought me to the library archives, and
Speaker 3: they were giving me boxes of letters that Lovelor and
Speaker 3: Irish miners had said looking for wives in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2: And I had all this glorious material about opium parlors
Speaker 2: and brottles and fights and bars and crazy stuff happening.
Speaker 2: It was a great little sin city. There was a
Speaker 2: lot of money from the mining wage. Saw everything sprang
Speaker 2: up around that. And I went back to Cork and
Speaker 2: I wrote one hundred and twenty thousand words, and I
Speaker 2: was all dead on the page. I had great texture,
Speaker 2: and I had great research, but I didn't know how
Speaker 2: to make it recede.
Speaker 1: How did you notice did on the page as a
Speaker 1: twenty And I trust you, and I trust your instinct
Speaker 1: from that determination and then that gathering of the story.
Speaker 1: Ostensibly you're rewarded for your determination. You've found the idea,
Speaker 1: You've followed the idea, people have shared it with you.
Speaker 1: Did you just know as a reader that it wasn't
Speaker 1: seeing the way you wanted it to?
Speaker 2: Exactly so? And I think the fortunate thing I've been
Speaker 2: quite a late starter. Was at twenty nine thirty or
Speaker 2: whatever it was. At this point, you know, I was
Speaker 2: a pretty practice reader. I reviewed books and stuff. I
Speaker 2: knew the quality of what was getting published, what was
Speaker 2: out there, and I knew what I had on the
Speaker 2: page was kind of I didn't have the chops yet.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't do whatever it is you're supposed
Speaker 2: to do the ten thousand hours or something to develop.
Speaker 2: I knew I had ability. I knew I could write
Speaker 2: perky sentences and good lines of dialogue and come up
Speaker 2: with kind of funny scenes, but I didn't have it consistently.
Speaker 2: And what I really didn't have was the people. I
Speaker 2: didn't have strong characters. This is what was technically wrong
Speaker 2: with the book. I thought it needed to be a
Speaker 2: broad canvas. I thought, I've got to do all of
Speaker 2: this story. I've got to do the boat across. I've
Speaker 2: got to do the train across, the bout data. I've
Speaker 2: got to do the mines, the bars, the brattles, the politics, everything.
Speaker 2: You know, I better try in a love story as well,
Speaker 2: and I better try this. And it was just got
Speaker 2: to be nine hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 1: You know that so makes sense as an early aspiration
Speaker 1: of you know, if you want to do it, you
Speaker 1: need to do it at scale. And if you want
Speaker 1: to do it at scale, then it needs the density
Speaker 1: of the entire world on the page. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think actually a very common thing is that early
Speaker 2: on in anty fiction writers practice that ambition and ability
Speaker 2: aren't quite matching up. You're often years away from the
Speaker 2: book you're first trying to write, you know. When I
Speaker 2: put it aside, I started to write short stories in
Speaker 2: a kind of fairly serious way. And you know, a
Speaker 2: short story is by no means an apprentice form for
Speaker 2: a novel. I don't consider that the case at all,
Speaker 2: but it is just concentrated distance. And sometimes you can
Speaker 2: get lucky inside a week or two have something that
Speaker 2: feels quite finished on your desk. And I started, in
Speaker 2: those very early attempts of short stories, I started to
Speaker 2: sound a bit more like myself. It's that thing of voice.
Speaker 2: It's that thing of voice. I mean. I have a
Speaker 2: very vivid memory one day of writing this, a bit
Speaker 2: of a short story about and there was a woman
Speaker 2: going on a train across the midlands of Ireland. And
Speaker 2: I was in the depths of this sentence, and Jesus,
Speaker 2: the sentence was gone on for pages, you know, and
Speaker 2: it was magnificent, and it was the greatest lyric description
Speaker 2: of the art Wish Midland has ever committed to paper,
Speaker 2: I'm confident to this day. And I kind of froze
Speaker 2: halfway through and looked down at the page and went,
Speaker 2: who the fuck is this guy? Because it wasn't me,
Speaker 2: you know, for one thing, it wasn't funny. And I
Speaker 2: am essentially a comedian, I think when I write. I
Speaker 2: think my fiction is often very darkly comic, but essentially comic,
Speaker 2: I think. And I started to write stories that were
Speaker 2: getting kind of funny and that were amusing me, and
Speaker 2: I started to have a good time at desk, and
Speaker 2: a very important realization hit me, which is that writing
Speaker 2: fiction is essentially a childlike activity. It's a kind of play.
Speaker 2: You're playing. You're making up warris and characters and voices
Speaker 2: and little stories, you know, and you should be having
Speaker 2: fun with it. Children are naturally able to fall into that,
Speaker 2: into their element with play, and we're more self conscious
Speaker 2: about it the older we get. But it struck me then,
Speaker 2: and it's something I very much hold until this day,
Speaker 2: is that if I'm not having a good time at
Speaker 2: my desk, beloved reader or beloved audience member or beloved
Speaker 2: viewer at the far end of the of the equation,
Speaker 2: isn't going to be having a good time either. So
Speaker 2: anytime I start to feel like a tortured genius, I
Speaker 2: get very wary.
Speaker 1: Save tortured genius for the writers' festivals and the publicity
Speaker 1: trails putting stuff on the page. I think when you
Speaker 1: talk about that kind of early career gap between ambition
Speaker 1: on the one hand and ability on the other, I'm
Speaker 1: curious about how much of that you know that I
Speaker 1: think the best writers are big readers themselves. How much
Speaker 1: of that gulf is about the kind of pressures of expectation.
Speaker 1: You know who you read, you know the kind of
Speaker 1: writers you aspire to sit alongside, and so expecting to
Speaker 1: kind of match them for ability out of the gate
Speaker 1: is part of the problem.
Speaker 2: I've been thinking about this recently, actually, because I've been
Speaker 2: thinking back to my early days and my first attempt
Speaker 2: at a novel, and I think, when what I've noticed
Speaker 2: from writers who are emerging now, whatever age they're emerging at,
Speaker 2: I think they're better read than we were back in
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties. I think they're more broadly read. I
Speaker 2: think they're reading all sorts of fiction and fiction and translation.
Speaker 2: And I would say a problem I had in my
Speaker 2: twenties out, my reading was very narrow. I would get
Speaker 2: obsessed with a couple of writers and then of course
Speaker 2: try and ape them on the page. My big thing
Speaker 2: was the great American Jews, Salt Below, Philip rot, stuff
Speaker 2: like that, you know, And I was determined to do
Speaker 2: for Cork City what Salt Belo had done for Chicago.
Speaker 2: You know, it's mortifying stuff, and it's very difficult to
Speaker 2: get past that aspiration, you know. I think George Saunders
Speaker 2: talks very well about an early fixation with Hemingway, you know,
Speaker 2: and things like reading stories like across the River and
Speaker 2: into the trees, and he'd be doing his version and
Speaker 2: it would be like across the park working lot and
Speaker 2: into the mall, you know, and something that just doesn't
Speaker 2: match it up and something is it working. You have
Speaker 2: to find that. You have to find your own world
Speaker 2: on the page. And funnily enough, it was short stories
Speaker 2: that brought me to it. I'd never really been a
Speaker 2: rabbit reader of short stories. I wasn't going out buying
Speaker 2: collections all the time. I did have a memorable visit
Speaker 2: to the Cork City Library Wanted in the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: where I bought one of those great old Norton anthologies.
Speaker 2: Home it was a twentieth century American short fiction. Everything
Speaker 2: you know from very early days John dos pass us up,
Speaker 2: True Chiever and Flannery O'Connor and all that stuff, and
Speaker 2: that was a great gosh, this is a great crash
Speaker 2: course almost you know, in the short stories of form,
Speaker 2: and very early responding to writers from the American South.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot in common between Irish writers
Speaker 2: and writers of the American South. There's a great strain
Speaker 2: of religiosity that comes into the pros that we can't help.
Speaker 2: You know that, there's a lyric impulse, there's a darkly
Speaker 2: comic impulse. If you read Flannery O'Connor story about a
Speaker 2: one legged Bible salesman in Georgia, that feels very close
Speaker 2: to home in the Western Ireland, this kind of crazy stuff.
Speaker 2: So I responded very much to that, and slowly but
Speaker 2: surely stories started to feel kind of a life for me,
Speaker 2: on on on on on the page. I'm still kind
Speaker 2: of devoted to the form of the short story. I
Speaker 2: still try my hand at them. I used to write
Speaker 2: them very quickly as a kid gunslinger, you know. I
Speaker 2: used to put out a story in two or three weeks,
Speaker 2: and now they think me months in my in my
Speaker 2: feeble middle years. You know, it's a mysterious form as well.
Speaker 2: In some ways, I think the closer you get to
Speaker 2: it and the longer it's been, that unless you know
Speaker 2: about it, you know why some stories work and why
Speaker 2: there's just don't come right for you. I always think
Speaker 2: I know how to write a short story until I
Speaker 2: start a new one, and then I go, fuck, I
Speaker 2: have no idea how to do this, you know. And
Speaker 2: I hate to use any phrases flippant or as pat
Speaker 2: as the trick of it with a business as esoteric
Speaker 2: and strange as writing fiction. But the trick of it
Speaker 2: is the right story for your desk at the right
Speaker 2: time in your life. It's understanding what the material for
Speaker 2: now is not the story you really want to write
Speaker 2: and you might be able to write in ten years time.
Speaker 2: Aren't the story you should have written when you were
Speaker 2: twenty two, you know? But what can you do now?
Speaker 2: What are you bitter enough about right now to make
Speaker 2: a piece of work about, or what's really, you know,
Speaker 2: inflaming your passions right now that you really want to
Speaker 2: respond to it.
Speaker 1: I love that the first passion you went with was
Speaker 1: bitterness as a motivating one for telling a good story.
Speaker 2: These are these are these are these are very valuable
Speaker 2: energies that we need as writers. Bitterness, shame, and like,
Speaker 2: I always think I'm getting somewhere if I read over
Speaker 2: a first draft of something, and if I feel more
Speaker 2: to fight, if I feel my cheeks reddening, you know,
Speaker 2: oh Jesus spotted I put down on the page. I
Speaker 2: think I'm getting somewhere.
Speaker 1: When we return, Kevin reveals how Walk in the Hills
Speaker 1: inspired his latest novel and why these days, glamorous sentences
Speaker 1: are not the most important thing in his writing. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. So that twenty five year lag between
Speaker 1: going to Montana and having a first tilted a book, well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I forgot. I forgot, I forgot the second half
Speaker 2: of that story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, my fascination comes from your description of kind of
Speaker 1: your process. Did you return to the earlier manuscript or
Speaker 1: did you just return to the setting and the place. Yeah?
Speaker 2: What what happened was I managed to, in the meantime
Speaker 2: get out six other books of fiction. And it was
Speaker 2: late in the pandemic. It was towards the end of
Speaker 2: the long dreary second year of the pandemic twenty one
Speaker 2: October twenty one, and I was due to write a novel.
Speaker 2: So I was kind of shopping around in my subconscious
Speaker 2: and I was convinced I was going to write a
Speaker 2: novel set in a squat in Amsterdam in the early
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. And I got to the point of spending
Speaker 2: a day and a half at it and thought, Fuck, no,
Speaker 2: I just don't have I just don't have this world yet.
Speaker 2: I don't have these characters yet. I may have at
Speaker 2: some top point, but I don't have them now. And
Speaker 2: going for I was out walking again. I was in
Speaker 2: the hills nearby where I live in County Slide on
Speaker 2: the northwest, just walking through the woods on the side
Speaker 2: of a mountain one day, and just a little as
Speaker 2: walking and writing are so connected, you know, because you're
Speaker 2: you're you're letting the unconscious kind of percolate back there,
Speaker 2: and just had a vision in my mind's eye of
Speaker 2: a young couple on horseback, riding double. And if they're
Speaker 2: riding double, they must be trying to get away from
Speaker 2: someplace fast. They're in trouble, you know. And it struck
Speaker 2: me about them as I saw them in my mind's
Speaker 2: eide that they were kind of very slight. They were
Speaker 2: kind of wayfish. So these weren't heroic characters or cowboys
Speaker 2: or anything, you know. But I thought, where they trying
Speaker 2: to get away from They're on a horse. It's a
Speaker 2: Western What if it's but Montana in eighteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: Just very quickly the succession of thoughts, and I thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's the setup. Runaway lovers, very easy. Make it fucket
Speaker 2: easy for yourself. You know, two runaway lovers trying to
Speaker 2: get out of but Montana. I have all that stuff,
Speaker 2: I know all the texture of the era. I could
Speaker 2: remember all the research. It was very embedded. And I'll
Speaker 2: call them Tom and Polly. And I then wrote the
Speaker 2: book in about ten months and had a ball with us.
Speaker 2: I'd got great fun with it because the characters felt
Speaker 2: alive straight away as I started to ride them. And
Speaker 2: another thing that experience gives you is that you've become
Speaker 2: more economical with your time. And when I have an
Speaker 2: idea like that and I think it might be a novel,
Speaker 2: I'll give this two weeks. So I'm going to give
Speaker 2: Tom Rourke a week, and I'm going to give poly
Speaker 2: Gillespie a week and I'll write from their point of
Speaker 2: view and see how it feels. So Tom Rourke is
Speaker 2: a degenerate, dissolute, twenty nine year old irishman with vague
Speaker 2: literary ambitions, and I know what that feels like. So
Speaker 2: I tried him for a week and it felt promising.
Speaker 2: You know, he was lurching around Butte Montana in eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety one on this epic pub crawl, brottle crawl, dope
Speaker 2: house crawl, and I was thinking, Okay, I'm getting the
Speaker 2: world building naturally as I go with him. This is promising.
Speaker 2: My second week, I said, I'm going to try poly Gillespie.
Speaker 2: Who's this young woman with a mysterious past who's arrived
Speaker 2: from Chicago to Butte as part of an arranged marriage.
Speaker 2: And I was more nervous because she's an American voice,
Speaker 2: so not immediately native to me. But I remember that
Speaker 2: Monday morning I wrote her in her voice for about
Speaker 2: ten minutes, and I said to myself, you have a novel.
Speaker 2: You have your Butte Montana novel. Because she was just
Speaker 2: ready to go. I could tune into her with she
Speaker 2: had this spacey, kind of dreamy kind of worldview that
Speaker 2: I felt very comfortable with, and I knew she would
Speaker 2: kind of earth the story for me.
Speaker 1: I can't remember a book I've had more fun with
Speaker 1: but also a sense of doom. Inevitably with his story
Speaker 1: like this, we know the beats of how a story
Speaker 1: like this goes, and in this case, the engine isn't
Speaker 1: irritation or shame. It's proper passion. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: a story about two people consumed by a kind of lust,
Speaker 1: both for each other and for the possibility that running
Speaker 1: away together gives them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's kind of I think what they recognize
Speaker 2: when when they meet each other for the first time,
Speaker 2: which is in a photographic studio where he has a
Speaker 2: has a job as an assistant to kind of a
Speaker 2: day job. When he's like in the midst of his
Speaker 2: various kind of drug and alcoholic reveries, he manages to
Speaker 2: go in for a few hours to displace and they meet,
Speaker 2: and as soon as they clap eyes on each other,
Speaker 2: I think they both realized, this is the great drama
Speaker 2: of our lives. This is it here, and we have
Speaker 2: no choice. We just have to got to follow this
Speaker 2: thing and see where it brings us. But it wasn't.
Speaker 2: It's actually having denied that there's any contemporary resonance for
Speaker 2: a story like this. It was significant that they meet
Speaker 2: in a photographics studio because eighteen ninety one, by Luck,
Speaker 2: I think, really is a very useful time to write about,
Speaker 2: because it's the very earliest iteration of our world. America
Speaker 2: has been electrified for the first time. Every main street
Speaker 2: has a little photographic studio, and very ordinary, very working
Speaker 2: class people, for the first time in human history are
Speaker 2: thinking about how they look, and they're thinking about an
Speaker 2: image and trying on style. You know, the rich people
Speaker 2: have been thinking about this for centuries because they've been
Speaker 2: having oil paintings made of them. But now every Tom,
Speaker 2: Dick and Harry has going, hey, how is this looking?
Speaker 1: How is this hat?
Speaker 2: And Tom and Poli are very aware of how they
Speaker 2: look together, and they're very kind of interested in that.
Speaker 2: So there is that sort of Bonny and Clyde kind
Speaker 2: of element to it that comes in again. But I
Speaker 2: was I had the original manuscript from the late nineties
Speaker 2: in a box under a bed in a guest room
Speaker 2: at the far in the house, and I was afraid
Speaker 2: to even put a finger in there. I wasn't going
Speaker 2: to find anything good. I remembered one phrase and I
Speaker 2: used it just to make it feel like it was
Speaker 2: still the same project. It was some sort of occult sense.
Speaker 1: A little gift to yourself, your past, a.
Speaker 2: Little gift to myself. That was the nicest thing about
Speaker 2: this project, really, I suppose was. I felt like I
Speaker 2: was paying off a debt to my twenty nine year
Speaker 2: old self. I was saying to my twenty nine year
Speaker 2: old self, this was a good idea for you. You
Speaker 2: were on the right track for such talents and abilities
Speaker 2: as you have. This is a great world for you,
Speaker 2: you know. So it was nice then to find Okay,
Speaker 2: you can. It can be a slogan, you know, and
Speaker 2: you can hang on to things for years and make
Speaker 2: something worthwhile of them. Like Alie writer will tell you
Speaker 2: that there are always abandoned stories and abandoned projects, but
Speaker 2: they're never fully abandoned. They're always sitting at the back
Speaker 2: of your mind, in your unconscious just waiting for some
Speaker 2: spark that might bring them to life.
Speaker 1: City of Berhin. You're twenty eleven, your first published novel, Yeah,
Speaker 1: after you'd brought out a book of short stories. In
Speaker 1: many ways, the beats of that story are the beats
Speaker 1: of a Western as well, And I'm curious about the
Speaker 1: generic conventions that you find useful to play with and
Speaker 1: what they give you permission to do when you're writing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've published four novels to date and I would say
Speaker 2: they all have strong genre elements. City of Bohan as
Speaker 2: kind of a futuristic, vaguely dystopian kind of gangster opera.
Speaker 2: It's a whole mix of things. My second published novel, Beatlebone,
Speaker 2: is the most unfashionable of all the genres. It's fan fiction,
Speaker 2: you know, imagining John Lennon in my story in the
Speaker 2: West of Ireland. Night Boat to Tangier is kind of
Speaker 2: a contemporary noir or an attempt at that, about two
Speaker 2: court gangsters adrift in Spain, and then an actual Western. Finally,
Speaker 2: what a Western gives you, Actually, it's very forgiving as
Speaker 2: a genre. It gives you a lot because the fundamental
Speaker 2: thing about Westerns that people have to be forever jumping
Speaker 2: up on horses and lighting out for fresh territory. And
Speaker 2: when they're doing that, you're naturally getting propulsion and momentum
Speaker 2: and they're going to have to have encounters. So the
Speaker 2: genre itself just gives you a lot of energy to
Speaker 2: start the thing rolling, you know, and it's it's all
Speaker 2: dend down to what kind of a rendition you can
Speaker 2: give to this all kind of valid, hoary form, you know,
Speaker 2: like it's it's it's funny like that. There's so many
Speaker 2: incredible examples of the Western from from film and from television,
Speaker 2: thinking of things like the Great Show Dead would but
Speaker 2: when you come to the literary Western and the Western
Speaker 2: in novels, you can exhaust a list of the really
Speaker 2: good stuff quite quickly. Anyone who writes a Western now
Speaker 2: has to not the gap in some way to the
Speaker 2: Cormack McCarty because he kept it a live as a
Speaker 2: possibility that you could still take this whole real form
Speaker 2: and do something new with it. And you know, there
Speaker 2: are good director has been good work over the years
Speaker 2: here and there in it. But you know, it feels
Speaker 2: like there's still plenty you can do with this. The
Speaker 2: fun of it is what attracts me.
Speaker 1: I think I read an interview with you where you
Speaker 1: talked about amongst the American writers who you revered Don Delilla,
Speaker 1: and I thought I thought that was an interesting an
Speaker 1: interesting parallel with your work Beetleburn in particular, is the
Speaker 1: novel of yours that I felt, and this might not
Speaker 1: be the right way to put it, but almost like
Speaker 1: I had a permission structure from the way DeLillo fictionalized
Speaker 1: real human beings and both took great care with it
Speaker 1: but also gave himself a license to play and take
Speaker 1: it where he wanted to take it. Is that a
Speaker 1: fair yeah?
Speaker 2: I think yeah, And I think talking as we were
Speaker 2: a little while ago, about how narrowly read a lot
Speaker 2: of emerging writers were back in the old days in
Speaker 2: the nineties, the standard form for the boy writers, for
Speaker 2: the baby boy writers was that you would graduate from
Speaker 2: Martin Amis to Don DeLillo about nineteen ninety five when
Speaker 2: Underworld about you know, that was that was the big
Speaker 2: graduation mark. And I was obsessed with Underworld when it
Speaker 2: came out. But my great Delila one was Allays Libra
Speaker 2: The Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's one of
Speaker 2: the books I keep close to my desk still because
Speaker 2: I go back to his portrait of that of Jack Ruby,
Speaker 2: the guy who assassinated Oswald, and turn who ran a
Speaker 2: strip show in Dallas. And it's maybe fifteen or twenty
Speaker 2: pages over the course of the book is all you get.
Speaker 2: But it is magnificent, This portrait of Ruby. It's incredibly funny.
Speaker 2: It's a crazy mad emphetament fueled scuzzy neon Dallas underworld
Speaker 2: in nearly nineteen sixties. And you can tell Dalilo is
Speaker 2: having a ball writing this stuff. He's just so having
Speaker 2: so much fun with it, and it is. Yeah, for Beatlebon,
Speaker 2: he was definitely one of the key kind of reference
Speaker 2: points I think in how you can how you can
Speaker 2: be bold enough and have a brass enough neck to
Speaker 2: take iconic events, are iconic characters and tried to use
Speaker 2: them for your fictional ends.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you have a kind of palpable sense
Speaker 1: of the ways in which your abilities, your experience as
Speaker 1: a writer. You know, you're a very different writer to
Speaker 1: the writer you were twenty five years ago that you've
Speaker 1: now kind of developed, even earned the stripes to be
Speaker 1: able to tell the stories that you're telling now, to
Speaker 1: kind of create the kind of world in the hat
Speaker 1: in Winter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's yeah, like writing fiction is the thing I've
Speaker 2: been doing every day since nineteen ninety nine. Basically, that's
Speaker 2: the first thing I do when I get up. I
Speaker 2: don't do anything else. I don't teach or anything like that.
Speaker 2: I've been lucky enough to time. I managed to make
Speaker 2: a readership quite quickly, and I've been able to keep
Speaker 2: going by just writing fiction. And it's long enough to
Speaker 2: see yourself change as a writer. I would say, in
Speaker 2: the very earliest things I was writing, my primary interest
Speaker 2: was in language and in the style and what I
Speaker 2: could do with the sentences, how much glamor I could
Speaker 2: get into the sentences. And I'm still very interested in
Speaker 2: this element. But I think most important for me now
Speaker 2: are the people, the characters in the stories. And I
Speaker 2: tend to spend a lot of time now just kind
Speaker 2: of in a day dreamy kind of way, kind of
Speaker 2: sitting with them and thinking about them and putting them
Speaker 2: them into situations before I even start to write.
Speaker 1: You know, well, you managed to combine that with still
Speaker 1: a more meticulous execution of a perfect sentence than many
Speaker 1: writers working today. And it's a privilege to read those sentences.
Speaker 1: It's been so good to talk to you today.
Speaker 2: That's been it's been great fun, Michaels, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Kevin Barry's latest novel, The Heart in Winter, and in fact,
Speaker 1: all these novels are available everywhere now. Rather than letting
Speaker 1: you know what else, I've been reading this week a
Speaker 1: bit of news and unfortunately a bittersweet bit of news.
Speaker 1: After producing almost one hundred episodes of Read This talking
Speaker 1: with some of the best writers from Australian around the world,
Speaker 1: as of next Thursday, June twenty six, Read This This
Speaker 1: will no longer have a home. Schwartz Media very kindly
Speaker 1: created this podcast in the first place and have been
Speaker 1: the publishers behind it since day one, and their support
Speaker 1: and belief in the show has been so rewarding and
Speaker 1: so exciting. But they're getting out of the audio game.
Speaker 1: You may have read news that seven am is being
Speaker 1: sold to a different media company, and as a consequence,
Speaker 1: there's no home for read This here anymore. We are
Speaker 1: deeply hopeful that it's not the end for Read This.
Speaker 1: We love making the show and we hope to continue
Speaker 1: to for many months and years to come. But for
Speaker 1: now there's a hiatus a coming, call it reading time.
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Speaker 1: is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing from
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Speaker 1: for listening, See you next week.