![]() ![]() Beatlebone has an understated supernatural undercurrent that put me in mind of Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson. Its sixth chapter breaks the fourth wall, introducing the novelist himself researching his project, and in its obsessions with reclaiming a counter-cultural past and a kind of deranged reportage, it feels like an Irish take on Iain Sinclair’s psychogeography. The quick-fire and oblique dialogue, with its air of menace, recalls early plays of Harold Pinter, like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. Since it’s a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, and given Barry’s own prose style, replete with “sea-bite’s hint-of-vulva”, “deathhauntedness” and “a silvering of the blood”, the spectre of James Joyce is never too distant. ![]() It’s a descent into madness like Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano. As I read Kevin Barry’s scintillating new novel, the ghosts of other books kept on rising up. ![]()
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