First Lines 6: Kevin Barry

Humour and heartache.

Photo by Andy Vult on Unsplash

Friends, it’s been a while. I was on holiday, and then travelling for work. And last week, while I was briefly home, I saw Kevin Barry’s latest play.

He’s not necessarily known as a playwright, although he has, over the years, adapted a number of his own works for the stage and screen, found success with the written-for-theatre Autumn Royal, and turned his hand to an adaptation of Frank O’Connor’s classic and much-loved short story, Guests of the Nation.

The Cave, staged in Dublin’s hallowed Abbey Theatre, is set in Barry’s south Co. Sligo stomping ground. The McRea brothers are living in a cave on Zion Hill from which they survey their town and consider the local depressives. We meet them as in the midst of a spiralling, social media-driven obsession with a Netflix actress. They field occasional visits from Helen, a local police officer. Beyond that, I won’t say much, except that The Cave has everything you might expect from its writer: a cast of downtrodden characters, a rural setting, pitch-black humour and misery.

Indeed, while The Cave is ostensibly an original work, Barry is drawing from a familiar well. His third collection, That Old Country Music, includes a short story (Ox Mountain Death Song) with a scene at Sligo’s Keash Caves. A line in the play is cribbed from another story from that batch, Old Stock:

Here’s a very old joke —

Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.

Since his debut collection, There are Little Kingdoms, was published in 2007, Barry’s back catalogue has snowballed into three collections, four novels and two original plays. The annual journal he publishes with his wife Olivia Smith, Winter Papers, is now in its tenth year. He is widely regarded as the greatest Irish short story writer of his generation.

After the play, reminded of the brilliance of his openings — The Cave begins with Archie McRea crawling out of the titular cavern and wailing — I decided he’d be next for the First Lines treatment. The hard part was whittling his back catalogue down to three.

Meadowsweet Farm is perhaps not the place you have prepared for.

Animal Needs, from There are Little Kingdoms, is a kind of flag-bearer for Barry’s style. The local area, known only as B_____, is rife with ‘alcoholism, garrulousness and depressive ideation’ and ‘long, bruised days on the midland plain’. We are taken around Meadowsweet Farm by its owner, John, who is ‘a gaunt and sallow man, long-armed, with livid, electric hair’ and ‘five foot eleven of peeled nerves’.

What I love about this opening is that it prompts a question. What do you think a place called ‘Meadowsweet Farm’ should be like? Conversely, if it’s ‘not the place you have prepared for’, what does that mean? It’s an exercise in contrast. Barry goes on to offer shades of the farm — the poultry shed, faulty wiring, the ‘general sensation of slurry’ — but we are already there with him. This is no pastoral idyll; this is the grimy midlands.

But it also makes you wonder, who decides on a name like that for a place like this? Is it aspirational? Tongue-in-cheek? Inherited?

She saw him often in the morning and often again around dusk as he walked out by the river.

Deer Season is probably my favourite Barry story, which makes me reluctant to give anything away, but also desperate to talk about it.

It vividly captures a particular strain of teenage selfishness and ignorance, the pain of sliding into adulthood with all its dark illuminations. The ‘she’ of the opening line has a goal, which she expects will bring happiness, worldliness. By the end, she has discovered that it can also bring regret, cause hurt.

When people say that the character(s) in a short story ought to change during its course, I think of Deer Season.

Here, the first line is a framing device, introducing us to our two characters: the watchful ‘she’, the as-yet unaware ‘him’. This story will be about this pair, although more about ‘she’, because we see this through the girl’s eyes. This is a relatively unusual choice for Barry — who often seems most at home in the skin of middle-aged men — but one he pulls off.

The male character is thinly drawn throughout, the protagonist’s adolescent hubris and self-regard providing the perfect cover. Even to her, he is but a rough sketch. She uses him, and they both suffer the consequences. Her reaction is unexpected without being unrealistic.

He climbs the twenty-three steps of the metal traverse bridge at 9.25 a.m., and not an instant before.

A Cruelty, which appears in Dark Lies the Island (the middle child of Barry’s collections), opens with a generous dollop of character. It’s not a particularly long sentence, but we can see that our protagonist, later introduced as Donie, has an eye for detail, and we are going on a journey with him. It’s a journey he’s taken before.

An opening like this works especially well with a particular kind of character. It calls to mind the first line of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.¹ This is a singularly gloomy story, as tightly wound as Donie himself. Donie’s careful, measured life, always seconds from unravelling, is thrown abruptly off course by the Cruelty of the title.

And as much as I love the beginning, I always have a lump in my throat reading the end. You can read A Cruelty on LitHub.

And so that brings to an end our whistle-stop tour of Kevin Barry’s three short story collections. His stints on The New Yorker Fiction or The Writer’s Voice podcasts are worth hunting down: he reads his own work and others’ with such character and wit that you’d be forgiven for thinking he was an actor, not a playwright.

If you have a favourite Barry effort, or if you have a suggestion for a short story maestro to tackle next, please do let me know in the comments!

1. ‘It was 7 minutes after midnight.’