I recently finished reading ‘Night Boat to Tangier’, a novel by Kevin Barry. I enjoyed it. On the face it’s the story of two aging Irish criminals – Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond – sitting in the ferry terminal in Algeciras waiting for Maurice’s daughter, Dilly, who may be going to or from Tangier.
Maurice and Charlie accost a young man who they think might know Dilly, casually terrorizing him in search of information on the woman’s whereabouts. They strike up a conversation with two other women whose English skills aren’t quite developed. And they drown their sorrows at the station’s bar: “It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma — a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it — and a Hibernian easement for it is suggested … we’ll go for an old drink.”
The book is interspersed with flashbacks to their younger years when they were both friends and rivals, running drugs between Morocco, Spain and Ireland. “But the money no longer is in dope. The money now is in people. The Mediterranean is a sea of slaves. The years have turned and left Maurice and Charlie behind. The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones. Also they are broke and grieving.”
It does recall a bit another work by an Irish writer – Waiting for Godot – but this one is brightened by Barry’s wonderful gift for dialogue which I admired again and again as I read the book. It’s both grim and compassionate and I felt a bit of compassion for Maurice and Charlie as I read the book despite some of the awful things they had done.
The book is filled with memories of their early days in Cork, in London, in Malaga and more, often in a drug and alcohol-induced haze. They truly are, at the end, broken men.
“Is there any end in sight, Maurice?” Charlie wonders.
“This is the great unfortunate thing,” Maurice reckons. “We might have a length of road to go yet.”
The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a NYT ten best books of the year in 2019 and was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. You should read it if only for the wonderful dialogue. Here’s the NYT Review.
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