Author Kevin Barry unlocks a novel’s secret 22 years later

In the woods near his home in Ireland, author Kevin Barry discovered the solution to a puzzle that had plagued him for more than 20 years.

“One day, late in the pandemic, I was walking in the mountains in County Sligo where I live now,” says Barry via Zoom. “I just saw it in my mind’s eye: A man and a woman riding double on a horse. And I thought, if they’re riding double, they need to get away from someplace quick. What’s their problem? Who are they? And that’s just the way they came to me.”

For Barry, the acclaimed author of “Night Boat to Tangier,” “Beatlebone,” and “City of Bohane,” the Irish woods felt like the landscape of an American Western. The vision of the couple sharing a horse unlocked a story he had been wanting to tell for over 20 years.

In his just-published new book, “The Heart in Winter,” set in the rough boomtown of Butte, Montana in 1891, an Irish ne’er-do-well and the mail-order bride of a wealthy miner set off a powerful chain of events.

“It felt like I was paying back a debt to my younger self because it was the first novel I attempted when I was in my late 20s,” says Barry.

Back in 1999, Barry was a freelance journalist in Cork, Ireland, with an aspiration to write a novel. While walking in the mountains in County Cork, he stumbled across abandoned copper mines and started researching their history. He learned that the miners had moved en masse to Butte, Montana in the 1880s and ’90s. “I thought, Wow, this is a Western—but it’s got Cork accents.”

With this inspiration, Barry visited Butte in October 1999, collecting material about its bars, brothels, and opium parlors. Despite his efforts, he couldn’t make the novel work at the time.

“I didn’t have the characters. They took another 22 years to appear,” he says, adding that it took the vision of the couple, Polly and Tom, to reveal the story. “I realized I had a way into my Butte, Montana novel now. It can be a smaller story than I envisaged when I first tried to write it.”

This realization led Barry back to Butte’s rich multicultural history. “There were miners in Europe—around the world—they all made for Butte, Montana. There was a huge rush on copper for the electrification of the United States, so they were making good money for the time.”

Barry points out that Irish people have always been economic migrants, noting that a third of Butte was Irish by the 1890s. He describes how the Irish community organized itself, opening numerous pubs and taking over law enforcement and the political apparatus, turning Butte into a “little Boston or a little Chicago.”

Drawing from this rich history of migration proved invaluable for Barry as a writer. “It opens up the world to you. You can put your characters pretty much anywhere in a believable way because we’ve always gone off, we’ve always traveled.”

The novel features hallmarks of a classic Western with the mucky realism of HBO’s “Deadwood,” the hardboiled romance of a film noir, and revisionist Western fashion. Barry acknowledges his influences from films and TV as well as literature, citing 1970s revisionist Westerns and Terrence Malick’s neo-Westerns as significant inspirations.

Beyond his love of film, Barry was aware of the novels of writers like Charles Portis, Barry Hannah, and Cormac McCarthy. He consulted McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” early on while writing a horse scene but decided to embrace his character’s ignorance about horses to avoid extensive research.

Barry fully embraced the trappings of genre writing. “When you’re writing a Western, and when you find yourself typing sentences like, ‘The sheriff said…,’ you just have to go with it. You just have to commit.”

Despite the vast landscape and range of influences, Barry’s novel packs a lot of great writing into a quick read. “As a reader, I love the 200-page novel,” he says. “I love that novel where I can just fall into this world completely.”

Striving to make his novels intense, Barry often uses short, vivid scenes. “I like the short intense bang of it.”

Barry emphasizes that if a writer is going to create a longer book, it must be exceptionally compelling. He references Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, praising its fresh and engaging narrative devoid of heavy research tones.

Aside from historical elements, Barry researched contemporary language, infusing his novel with authentic, often salty dialogue. He sought to keep the language fresh to avoid an antique feel.

Barry also excels in audiobook narration, making his stories come alive. “I’m kind of a frustrated ham actor. I like to try the accents and all this. I rehearse a lot for them.”

Reading his work out loud is a crucial part of Barry’s process. He finds it helps him uncover the real narrative thread and detects evasions from the real story more easily. “When you hear it aloud, you really get to the quick of it.”

Barry’s dedication to both his writing and his audiobook performances ensures that his stories resonate, whether read on the page or heard aloud.

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