The Heart in Winter – Kevin Barry

It’s 1891 in Butte, Montana, a town filled with Irish miners and dissolution, and poet manqué but consummate wastrel and opium addict Tom Rourke meets spunky Polly Gillespie, newly-wed to a dry stick of a man but not married to a loveless existence and before you know it, we are joining the young runaway lovers on an unprettified, achingly intense flight and romance through the wilds of the American west.
 
Under icy stars and suffering a love that you feel in your own blood and bones, their faithful Palomino takes them where their fate and bravado must go, with curious characters and hunters on that trail. What a pair of desperados they make, Tom the hapless hero, Polly the more knowing, if equally vulnerable, of our hope-cursed sweethearts. Their voices are utterly real, common and sublime.
 
The brightest star of the brilliant tale is the language itself. The entire novel is a prose poem. Barry is one of those Irish writers who make English a language of their poetic very own. Open the book at any page and you will find imagery to charm with its surprise. Such a prosaic an object as a radiator “throbbed like a fat little sun god”, while “an acre of starlings” is a “a great thumbprint forming and breaking and reforming”. “The clear light of day was a kind of forgiveness.”

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