Book review: “Night Boat to Tangier” by Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry’s 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier is the story of Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond, two morose, self-absorbed and emotionally fragile Irish gangsters of the small-bore variety.

As the novel opens the two friends who have also been enemies are in their early fifties, sitting in a ferry station in Algeciras in southern Spain, looking, in a vague and haphazard way, to find Maurice’s twenty-three-year-old dreadlocked daughter Dilly, gone from home for three years.

The novel tells their story in flash-backs to the mid-1990s and in reminiscences of their earlier time together in the early 1980s.

Theirs is a story, Barry seems to insist, that is the sum of Irish history and culture.

 

“A line of madmen”

At one point, Maurice, in his mid-thirties, is spending time with his Algerian paramour Karima in Malaga, and Barry writes:

The ridiculous facts of his life paraded past on the tile counter of the bar, grinning like minstrels and taunting. He was from a line of madmen centuries deep.

Unknown to the two aging criminals, Dilly shows up at the station and hides in plain sight.  Barry writes:

She could not control the images that came through on the sleepless nights. She was from a line of insomniacs twelve hundred years long.

 

“A long line of broken heartedness”

Cynthia — Maurice’s wife, Charlie’s lover and Dilly’s mother — is suffering from untreatable cancer and, as she considers suicide by drowning, ponders the Irish historical context.

Drownings give only drowning — this is everywhere in the annals, everywhere in the lore. Drownings come in patterns; they throng and cluster. The island race has a native talent for the genre.

At the novel’s end, Maurice says to Charlie:

I mean it’s as profound an experience as the world has to offer, in a way, is a broken heart.

I come from a long line of the same, Maurice. The broken heartedness.

 

Suffering from suffering

Indeed, it can seem to a reader that Maurice and Charlie, as well as Cynthia and Dilly, are drowning in their Irishness. Kept awake by their Irishness. Crazy made because of their Irishness. Deeply Irish in their broken heartedness.

These two — these four — are suffering from suffering, from sadness, from want of sex and too much sex, from sin and guilt. They are prototypical Irish, quintessential Irish.

They are the sort of Irish who are deep in their despair and seem perhaps to enjoy it. The sort of Irish who have no truck with hope or joy.

 

Seven distractions

On the second page of the novel, as the two men are sitting on the bench they will occupy most of their time in the station, they see in the faces of those passing by them “a blur of the seven distractions — love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want of death.”

Neither Charlie nor Maurice achieve want-of-death although they think about self-death — and Maurice comes very close to taking his life, and the life of the child Dilly.

They check off the others easily enough — lust, for sure; sentimentality for all their good old younger times; avarice in their drug-dealing successes; pain, in some cases self-inflicted, emotionally and physically; love, perhaps of each member of the four for each of the others; and grief, for the destruction of love and of possibility.

 

The stuff of poetry

One way to read Night Boat to Tangier is that it is Barry’s warning lesson on what happens when an Irishman — or maybe anyone — lets himself/herself/themselves get distracted from actual living.

But passing along lessons doesn’t seem what Barry really wants to do. He seems to find the deep despair of these two men — these four people — to be intensely interesting, the stuff of poetry.  He is, after all, an Irish writer.

At one point, Maurice has laid himself out on the bench with his hands folded and his eyes closed, and Charlie mimes funereal gestures, and Barry writes:

The manic warmth of his smile would light a chapel — Charlie’s smile is, of its own right, an enlivened thing. It travels the terminal as though disembodied from him. It leaves a woven lace of hysterical menace in its wake.

“A woven lace of hysterical menace” — perhaps a line of it centuries long.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.5.25