Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry review — dirty rotten scoundrels (2024)

Many novels are turned into plays, but few plays are turned into novels. Kevin Barry’s latest book, which started life as a script for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, gives a clue as to why.

Night Boat to Tangier is a stagey, quasi-poetic mood piece about two gangsters from Cork brooding in a ferry terminal in Algeciras in Spain. Presumably, the directors of the Abbey weren’t convinced: the play was never performed. Barry (a self-described “frustrated actor”) has now reheated it as a star vehicle for his own swaggering prose.

Maurice Hearne (“his left eye is smeared and dead”) and Charlie Redmond (“limps soulfully”) are an ageing “vaudeville pair” yoked together by drug deals, unsettled scores and their love for the same woman, Charlie’s wife Cynthia. Maurice and Cynthia’s 23-year-old daughter, Dilly, has run off to Spain with a bunch of crusties, but rumour has it that she’s about to board a boat to Tangier. Maurice and Charlie try to track her down by asking vaguely rattling questions of everyone passing through the seedy port. While they wait, they reminisce about money, girls, fiascos with crowbars and Moroccan goats. “The stories we could tell!” Maurice says.

But there is a lot of telling, not much showing. Barry writes with real exuberance. “Face on him like a bad marriage,” Maurice observes of a passer-by. But all the working-class Irish slang (jinky = cool; gaatch = face etc) and pickled wit can’t hide the flimsiness of the story.

At times it reads like a pastiche of the Irish playwrights Samuel Beckett and Martin McDonagh, whose male double acts manage to be hilarious and threatening just by mooching about. Sure enough, the publisher is dubbing it “Waiting for Godot meets In Bruges”. But the bleak humour and lyrical zaniness seem forced, the promised violence rarely menacing. If this is Barry being his best bad self… well, it feels like someone coming to a fancy-dress party in a £29.99 gangster costume from Amazon.

Barry wears his musical influences heavily, too. The premise seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan’s If You See Her Say Hello (“she might be in Tangier”), but in person, Barry styles himself like Tom Waits, and the novel is a long horny growl about the broken-down lives and broken-down dreams of old rascals. He says he writes for people who “read with their ears”, but it’s like a song missing a melody, a play awaiting actors.

The dangers of turning a script into fiction are many and Barry skirts none of them. A novel needs interiority, an intimacy between characters and reader, a simultaneous conveyance of narrative and commentary. Barry does the bare minimum. There’s plenty of moping for lost times that are alluded to in only the most perfunctory way. And he relies too much on predictably collocated images of the beautiful and the ugly. One woman Maurice sleeps with “has the manners of a f***en sheep-shearer”, but he nevertheless “saw the stars of heaven when he came”.

It’s strange because at the novel’s heart, there’s a love triangle that had the potential to be dramatic and intoxicating. When, at the end, Cynthia recalls “the sleeplessness and pain of the long absences, the hot lurches of emotion, the sudden reversals of fortune, the endless pleadings, the slow relentings, the golden times of morphiate heaven, the atrocities on both sides, the shock tactics, and the giddy joy of their lavish sexual reunions”, it feels like news to the reader.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
Canongate £14.99 pp214

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