Fifty Books Project 2023

 Night Boat to Tangiers by Kevin Barry

It is night in the terminal building at the port of Algeciras.  The last ferry has moved out for Tangier.  There is almost nobody left on the floor.  The tannoys are silent.  The café bar is locked down and shuttered.  Beneath the sign marked INFORMACIÓN, the desk is empty, the hatch in darkness.  Along from the hatch, on the same bench, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit together alone but for their remorse.  They have the tune of it easily, by nature almost it seems.

Another thing you’d say for it, Charlie

Is what Maurice?

That in a sense it’s a very rich taste of life you get.  There a special intensity to it.

Come again Moss?

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

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

Is that right Charles?

The Redmond men all wind up with the hearts busted in their boxes.  It’s part of the deal with us, apparently.

They look left, they look right, and in perfect tandem.

You think she can look after herself?  Dilly?

 

I read Barry’s earlier book of short stories, Dark Lies the Island, some years ago.  It had several memorable short stories in the vein of emotional realism.  That attracted me to his first novel, City of Bohane in 2011.  That was a richly descriptive work of speculative fiction – imagine a George Saunders version of The Gangs of New York.  I was not sure what to expect with this new novel, and it seems to split the difference – stylistically rich and yet rooted in realism.

The story is entirely focused on two aging criminals – Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond.  They have come to the ferry port in Algeciras in the Bay of Gibraltar on the rumor that Charlie’s daughter, Dilly, will be arriving on the ferry from Tangier.  She is not expecting them and both the reader and the two men sense that she may be trying to avoid them.  They variously threaten, follow and cajole people who might know her – that suspicion being based largely on their dreadlocks and their dogs – and remain convinced that she will show up.

While they wait, we flash back to learn the story of Maurice and Charlie’s development as drug dealers, their early success and the long string of failures that has left them near destitution in this ferry station.  We learn also of their relationship with Cynthia – Dilly’s mother, the love of Charlie’s, and probably Maurice’s, life.  Charlie’s attempt to live something close to a normal life (albeit drug-fueled) with Cynthia and Dilly is tied up with his slow loss of control – over crime, drugs, his grasp of fidelity and, for a time, his relationship with Maurice.  By the time we get to this night in Algeciras, Cynthia has died, Maurice and Charlie have reunited.  We slowly come to realize that their desire to reunite with Dilly is more desperate than threatening, more emotional than criminal.

There is a wonderful lyricism in the conversations of these two, both their tough guy meetings with the unfortunate passengers that catch their eye and their more philosophical and emotional musings on the course of life.  There is a good deal of Vladimir and Estragon here – the two unfortunates who talk their way through Becket’s Waiting For Godot, but where Becket removed his pair from any specific historical context, leaving them in a post-apocalyptic world of uncertain provenance, Maurice and Charlie are all too well encased in history – their own, as well as that of the last millennium.  Their world is also post-apocalyptic, but here the apocalypse is entirely personal.  These are men not meant for old age and they don’t know what to do with it now that it has arrived.  The travelers they are surrounded with have some direction. Maurice and Charlie have nowhere left to go.

Barry has a swift and efficient way with characterization.  Dilly appears for only a moment at the end, but is as surprising as she is real.  The contrast between her well planned trip – she has a very clear destination and purpose, and the older men’s aimless, hulking presence changes our feelings for both her and the men.  Her response to their presence is both tragic and hopeful, though our hopes for her do not extend to Maurice and Charlie.

Throughout, I knew I was in the hands of a writer in full control of his power and his material – Night Boat to Tangier makes a distant world seem familiar while also making familiarity seem odd and new.