All You Need Is Imagination: A Guest Post by Kevin Barry
Books can take us anywhere, anytime — like the 19th century wild west. Kevin Barry’s latest, The Heart in Winter, is a rip-roaring western with a dazzling love story at its center. Discover the inspiration behind this story and how Barry crafted his characters, down below.
Hardcover $28.00
The Heart in Winter
The Heart in Winter
By Kevin Barry
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
Fans of Charles Portis and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers: Don’t miss this wildly funny western. Fans of Barry’s acclaimed novel Night Boat to Tangier, same goes for you.
Fans of Charles Portis and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers: Don’t miss this wildly funny western. Fans of Barry’s acclaimed novel Night Boat to Tangier, same goes for you.
The view from my room at the Capri Motel in Butte, Montana, was evocative — the ruins of the old copper mining pits and their gallows frames rising elegantly against the Rocky Mountain dusk. I knew that a century before a community of ten thousand Irish migrants had established itself here, working the mines by day and night, and marking time in the bars and brothels and opium parlours, too. It felt like just the place to write a Western, but with a difference – a Western with Irish accents.
It was 1999 and I was young man with a plan but somehow my Western never took. I had texture and atmosphere but the novel lacked compelling characters – I didn’t have the people yet. Also, I didn’t know how to reduce the material down, how to compress it in the edit and force a sense of true, lived life. And so my great Butte, Montana novel was quietly pushed to one side.
I’d been a likely candidate to attempt a Western. As a child in Ireland in the 1970s, we had access to just one TV channel, which filled its afternoon schedule with re-runs of old Westerns. By the age of three I was watching a half-dozen a week – I’d hear the clippety-clop of hooves across the screen and crawl madly across the rug towards our black-and-white set. In the 1980s, I became a wannabe cineaste, and discovered the great revisionist Westerns, films like McCabe And Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks and I developed a passion – that abides – for Terence Malick’s sublime ’70s neo-Westerns, Badlands and Days Of Heaven. By the time I was attempting to write fiction in the 1990s, my interest in the genre had streamed into its literary expression, or more precisely into the novels of Cormac McCarthy. With books like Blood Meridian, he seemed to have rescued the Western as a valid literary genre – he showed there was life in the game still.
After abandoning my first effort at the Butte, Montana novel, I wrote six other books but Westerns were always on my mind. My first published novel, City Of Bohane, told of a gang-dominated Irish city of the 2050s, but it was really a Western. When the TV show Deadwood began to stream, unfurling the immortally profane dialogue of its creator David Milch, I was drawn back in again.
Late in the pandemic, in October 2021, I was walking through the woods in County Sligo one day when I realised that if you’re alone in the woods, you’re in a Western – all you need is imagination. And just then my characters appeared. I knew at once they were runaway lovers called Tom and Polly and I knew with certainty that their adventure was about to begin in Butte, Montana, in 1891.
Sometimes writing is like this. Sometimes it’s a slow game and you’ve got to give the story time to show itself. Now, a quarter of a century on from that room at the Capri Motel, my Butte, Montana novel is finally ready to meet its readers.
Kevin Barry