Pete Hamill
City of Bohane, the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels…marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy…In prose that is both dense and flowing, Barry takes us on a roaring journey, among human beings who are trapped in life its own damned self. Nostalgia grips many of them, even when they slash angrily at sentimentality. None of it is real, yet all of it feels true. This powerful, exuberant fiction is as true as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner and, in a different way, even the Broadway of Damon Runyon. Those places were not real. The stories remain true.
—The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Barry’s debut novel, a near-future noir, takes readers on a walking tour of Bohane, an apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland’s west coast. One of its seedier precincts, the Back Trace, is ruled by underworld boss Logan Hartnett of the Hartnett Fancy gang, who governs like an Irish Don Corleone. But the graying Hartnett finds his power threatened when his rival, the Gant Broderick, returns after a 25-year absence. Hartnett also has to cope with an upstart gang, the Cusacks, that wants to take over the Trace. To make matters worse, his wife, Macu, who is also the Gant’s former lover, wants him to give up the life. And finally, tough Fancy girl Jenni Ching, a “saucy little ticket” with a “pack of feral teenage sluts at her beck ’n’ call in the Bohane Trace,” may be playing both ends against the middle. How Hartnett handles these various crises forms the dramatic core, but with so many literary influences running through it, the novel reads as if China Miéville and Irvine Welsh had collaborated to update Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Although this sort of future-shock noir is nothing new and the elliptical narrative peters out before it reaches its inconclusive climax, the author succeeds with a continual barrage of hybrid language reminiscent of Anthony Burgess at his A Clockwork Orange best. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
City of Bohane, the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy.” —Pete Hamill, The New York Times Book Review (front cover)
“Barry's first novel is a grizzled piece of futuristic Irish noir with strong ties to the classic gang epics of Yore. . . . The genre stew—which incorporates a Machiavellian alcoholic mother, flag-waving street fights, and uncertain alliances—is imbued throughout with Barry's inventively vulgar language.” —The New Yorker
“As you prowl the streets of Bohane with Barry's motley assortment of thugs and criminal masterminds, you will find yourself drawn into their world and increasingly sympathetic to their assorted aims and dreams.” —Boston Globe
“City of Bohane offers a dystopian vision that is splendidly drawn if not shockingly inventive. . . . [Barry's] descriptions are notably vibrant (a December day is 'as miserable as hells scullery) and his syntax strikingly creative.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer, Grade: A
“Although Barry has set this bewitching, stylized noir pageant of underworld dynastic upheaval in the grim near-future, it has a timeless air, with spookily beautiful evocations of ancient Irish mythology and an elegiac sense of civilization's attenuation while the old, bred-in-the-bones urges are resurgent.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Barry seems to relish splashing around in the literary mud puddles left behind by language-obsessed writers like Flann O'Brian, Cormac McCarthy, and Irvine Welsh. Meanwhile, an equally passionate love of film (think Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone) casts a flickering shadow over Barry's fictional world's pop culture crashes into language, and they are both dressed to the nines.” —Shelf Awareness
“This wild-ass ripsnorter, set in Ireland about 40 years from now, is a bravura, Nabokovian mind-blower. . . . It's elegiac, lyrical, rollicking fun that mixes Brian Friel with A Clockwork Orange.” —Library Journal, "Books for Dudes"
“The best novel to come out of Ireland since Ulysses.” —Irvine Welsh
“Kevin Barry is a genius. He is doing with his life and his gift exactly what he was put on this earth to do and continues the long and great line of Irish writers. His debut novel City of Bohane is an original and remarkable work of inventiveness. . . . As I read, I felt fortunate to gawp at this wondrous treasure trove of Barry's creativity and mastery.” —Ethel Rohan
“Kevin Barry is the real thing, and nothing can stop him.” —David Guterson
“City of Bohane is an unforgettably wonderful novel: hilarious, unique, utterly believable. It's Joyce meets Anthony Burgess, and as funny as Flann O'Brien. We Kevin Barry fans have known for a while that he is a writer of rarest gifts, but this book is an electrifying masterpiece.” —Joseph O'Connor
“Kevin Barry is unique, a one-man school. His work is hilarious and unpredictable—and always brilliant.” —Roddy Doyle
Kirkus Reviews
Gangland warfare rules the day in an imagined, decivilized Irish city. Roll up Joyce, Dickens, Anthony Burgess and Marty Scorsese, sprinkle with a dash of Terry Gilliam, and smoke up. That's roughly the literary experience to be had from ingesting this marvelously mashed-up creation from Irish storyteller Barry (There Are Little Kingdoms, 2007). The author goes for broke in constructing his fictional City of Bohane, a once-great city on the west coast of Ireland that has taken 40 years to fall into utter decay. The setting is a rich stew of ethnicities, loyalties, gangster cred, vices and technologically barren conflicts. Different provinces promise different pleasures: parallel streets in New Town, barely controlled chaos in the Back Trace, fetish parlors and shooting galleries in Smoketown, all behind the moat of the Big Nothin'. Pulling the strings on this criminality is Logan Hartnett, a gaunt, pale rake called "The Albino." Hartnett is beleaguered by harpy wife Immaculata and protected by a trio of young warriors: ambitious Wolfie Stanners, irrepressible Fucker Burke and razor-cool Jenni Ching, who works all sides with equal aplomb. A "welt of vengeance" threatens to jump off, after a Cusack of the Rises gets "Reefed" in Smoketown. Make sense? Much like the fiction of Irvine Welsh, the vernacular takes some acclimatization. Stirring the pot is the fact that Hartnett's mortal enemy, "The Gant Broderick," has sashayed back into town. "Halways pikey, halfways whiteman. Been gone outta the creation since back in the day. Was the dude used to have the runnins before the Long Fella. Use' t'do a line with the Long Fella's missus an' all, y'check?" explains Wolfie in his messy patois. The familiar gangland drama won't come as any great surprise, pulling in traces of pulp fiction, cop flicks and the grittier dystopian films into its gravity, but its style is breathlessly cool. Barry's addictive dialect and faultless confidence make this volatile novel a rare treat.
