Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry

Perhaps it was the hint of the Irish but I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir and Estragon as I read this tale of mid life musings and regrets. Two ageing gangsters aren’t waiting for Godot but they are waiting for the boat from Tangier that may or may not carry a daughter.  There is nothing particularly likeable about these hitherto violent and drug crazed individuals. But there is a paradox in the quality of the writing that describes their dissolute lives and disordered thoughts. The book reads more like a prose poem than a gangster fiction in parts. Yet it seeks to offer us the opportunity to dig deeper into the criminal mind than we might care to outside of the covers of a book.

Barry seldom allows his reader to stray far from the under current of threat that might be unleashed by Maurice and Charlie’s thug like mentalities but there is an attempt at humour and if you can allow yourself to step back emotionally and view these two caricatures, you can, almost but not quite, feel some sort of amused pity for them. 

Plenty of the tale is dialogue driven and set in a dual timescale, loosely, the past and the present. The potential consequences of felony are never far from the surface in the past sequences of the novel. The regrets and analysis of that nefarious past is mused on by the two men in the present sections while they wait. This creates another paradox because these ‘bad’ men seem to have hearts. But do they have regrets for their beleaguered pasts? 

There is an acute perception for the lives and minds of a certain section of society perhaps. It’s a world few of us will inhabit, hopefully, which allows us to be objective and I think that’s where the novel takes so much of its strength. That and the grace of the writing which somehow seemed unexpected within the context of a gangster story. The language of the two protagonists is rich and raw, (I won’t quote!) a further contrast between the more lyrical passages in the book. 

‘it is night again in Algeciras. The rain comes through the lights of the harbour but now more meekly. Charlie Redmond leans back beneath the jut of the ticket agent’s awning. He huddles into the knit of his thin shoulders. The prospect of another November is a mean taste at the back of his throat.’

And I suppose you could remove yourself from the gangster element and view this as a book about male friendship. Reminiscences of loves and lives lived and partly lost with considerations of how things might have been different.

It’s a clever book and I have to admit I found myself wanting to read it with an Irish accent. The suggestion of folklore and myth is also weaving its way through the narrative. It’s quite a unique achievement. And I can see why it was long listed for the Booker Prize.

Thanks to Canongate Books for this gifted copy.