Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry - review

Two Irishmen walk into a ferry terminal. That sounds like the start of a bad joke— but it’s actually the premise for Kevin Barry’s strangely compelling third novel.

The guys are both middle-aged gangsters, one with a gammy eye and the other with a dodgy knee, and they’re holed up in a Spanish port waiting for a long-lost daughter to show up.

It’s an interminable wait — punctuated with mordant Irish wit and banter. The end result is a cross between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges; sad and funny in equal measure.

In interviews, Barry has expressed his admiration for the best TV writing today — he believes that the most ambitious and experimental work is happening for the screen, rather than in literature, and he’s argued that novelists need to be open to stealing techniques being pioneered elsewhere.

You can feel that influence in Night Boat to Tangier. The scenes in the ferry terminal are written like a screenplay: all dialogue and stage directions, with next to nothing else besides.

And as the minutes tick by, Barry cuts to scenes from the past, told in a more conventionally novelistic manner, illuminating the path that’s led the two men to their stakeout.

But as with everything Barry writes, it’s the language that grips you by the throat — just so lyrically Irish. Take this short description of the coastal town of Berehaven: “The boats put out to sea. The trawlers moved their rust in the midday sun. The harbour was a skivvy to itself always.”

When you read writing like that, it makes you think: who is the best novelist still cranking out truly exceptional work today? Rushdie, Amis, Ishiguro — legends one and all, but their most recent novels were, tragically, crushingly mediocre. I suppose that’s what happens with age. No matter how brilliant you once were, you lose a yard or three as the decades roll by, and suddenly you’re no longer at the top of your game.

Among the next generation of writers — Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and so on — the one that stands above the rest for ambition, language and sheer verve is Barry.

If you haven’t heard of him yet, you soon will. I’d wager he’ll wind up with the Nobel Prize for Literature before he’s done, and it beggars belief that his last novel, Beatlebone, didn’t bag the Booker Prize when it came out in 2015. Come to think of it, his first full-length work of fiction, City of Bohane, really ought to have won it too.

While Night Boat to Tangier doesn’t quite hit the heady heights of his earlier work (or his astonishingly good collections of short stories) it’s still a first-rate read.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (Canongate, £14.99)