Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This book will have the reader laughing out loud one minute and silenced into a deep reflection the next. In tight, concise pose Kevin Barry can bring humanity to the smallest of actions or statements. Two Irishmen Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redman are looking the latter’s daughter Dilly in a Spanish port, awaiting a ferry to Tangiers. We learn what has brought us to the moment, throughout failed relationships and male friendship. It is a story of remorse, regret and heartbreak.

I particularly recommend the audiobook read by the author.

I've always begrudged the time Kevin Barry spends writing novels, as I means less time for the shirt stories of which he is an absolute master.

However, Night Boat to Tangier is way ahead of City of Bohane and has a greater wholeness than Beatlebone

Ageing Irish gangsters Maurice and Charlie are waiting in the port of Algeciras for a flown-away hippy daughter. During this long wait, they reminisce and their stories, joint and separate, are told in flashback.

This has the unsettling effect, at times, of stripping past violence, say, of present menace and skilled technician Barry tightens and loosens the screws to best effect.

As ever with Barry, the writing is originsl, colourful and vivid.

A pleasure to read.

What a darkly fun and intriguing book this turned out to be!

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry defies description. It’s not strictly a black comedy, though it’s packed with small, comic moments. And it’s not strictly a crime novel, because it doesn’t revolve around a particular crime that needs to be solved, but it does star two bad men out to get what they can through nefarious means. I guess it’s a blend of both, with a ribbon of pathos and melancholy running through it.

It brought to mind all the surrealness of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and the Spanish expat bits of Colm Toibin’s novel The South.

So what’s it about, I hear you ask? Essentially it’s about two Irish gangsters, Charlie Redmond and Maurice (Moss) Hearne, and the ups and downs they have weathered over the years as drug dealers with operations in Cork and Spain.

When the book opens the pair — “in their low fifties, the years are rolling out like a tide now” — are at the Spanish port of Algeciras waiting for the night boat from Tangier (hence the book’s title). They don’t plan to get on the boat, they are waiting for someone to get off it. That someone happens to be Maurice’s 23-year-old daughter, Dilly, who has been missing for three years.

As the pair wait, they interrogate other people coming off the boat, wanting to know if they might have seen Dilly. One of the unsuspecting people they confront is Benny, a young British man with dreadlocks and a dog on a rope, the kind of person they believe Dilly, who also has dreadlocks, would hang out with.

The pair don’t have much luck finding anyone who knows Dilly, but that doesn’t stop them waiting — and intimidating anyone they think might have some information that could help them locate her.

But that’s not all there is to the story.

Barry does something rather clever with Night Boat to Tangier because he fleshes out the backstories of both men in alternate chapters. This allows us to find out how the pair developed their “business” and all the shenanigans they have carried out since the late 1990s, the women they have had relationships with and the deals they have done both home and abroad.

It also allows us to come to know these men, so they become less caricature — the hard men with attitude and dry wit — and more “real”. Barry does this so well that even against our better judgment we empathise with them instead of condemning them because they appear to be all-too-human, with flaws and foibles we can understand.

What I liked about this novel was its structure switching between the current day at the port of Algeciras and the flashbacks that fill in the gaps between now and the 1990s.

I also liked the linguistic changes between these chapters, so that the sections at the port are written staccato style, mainly in dialogue, with many funny one-liners and a hint of menace, while the flashback chapters are written in a more “traditional” third-person style to give a more rounded overview of the men and their lives.

It’s a well-crafted audacious novel, written in cracking prose, one that marries black comedy with an almost mournful undertone. Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for last year’s Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2019. And it may just well make my Top 10 at the end of this year.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are a couple of shady characters, both past their best.
They are spending the night at the Spanish Ferry terminal hoping to catch sight of Maurice’s daughter Tilly whom he hasn’t seen in years, while they put the time in reminiscing about their criminal past.
Back in the day, the tools of their trade were threats and violence, and both Maurice and Charlie slip back in this mode automatically as required, nostalgic for times long gone.
This is the type of book I need to read aloud in my head to get the rhythm of the dialogue, like a play, the words scream to be spoken. Kevin Barry is head and shoulders above most of today’s writers for his dark humour and moodily expressive lyricism.
As Maurice and Charlie’s history is revealed, the story takes some surprising turns.
This is a memorable read.

Loved this book. What a refreshing change to read something out of my comfort zone. So glad I did. The two main characters are funny, eccentric, and slightly mad. The novel is both sad and darkly funny. Recommended if you like quirkiness.

To me the characters dialogue felt a bit like 'In Bruges' (though they are drug-runners not hit men) meets 'Waiting for Godot', which in itself is interesting as all three (including this book) are by Irish authors or in McDonagh's case London-Irish. There is a thoughtful, funny, abstract and at times tragic sense of the relationship, and all three involve waiting for someone. For me it took a little while to engage with the characters, but once that happened I found the book hard to put down

This really looks like being the true epitome of Marmite transferred to the printed page. For this reader the decision to cut his losses was made after 22%. Failing to finish a book is unusual - less than 2% of reviewed books have suffered that ignominy. But this book suffered from the author appearing to try too hard to synthesise a work in the style of others. I recognise that this appears to be a minority opinion based on what other reviewers on netgalley and elsewhere have to say about it, but the combination of an excessive use of dialogue characterised by insouciant and threatening black humour and gratuitous violence ate away at whatever enjoyment there was in the undoubtedly clever and creative writing. Not for me.

Night Boat to Tangier is a linguistic delight, showcasing Kevin Barry's astonishing way with words and dialogue as he tells the story of two aging gangsters from Cork who have travelled to Tangier to try and find a missing daughter.

Flashbacks to their earlier lives provide the context, but the writing here is the star of the show.

Think Waiting for Godot crossed with The Sopranos and you're part way there.

Highly recommended and highly deserving of the Booker longlist nomination.

Publishers make a lot of claims for their books but describing Night Boat to Tangier as ‘Waiting for Godot meets In Bruges’ is pretty much spot on. Still, I owe them a review so I’d better find some more to say about it.

Maurice and Charlie are two gangsters in their fifties who are waiting in the port in Algeciras for the eponymous night boat. It emerges, via some casual violence and some comic dialogues with passengers and staff, that they are looking for Maurice’s missing daughter, Dilly, who has left home and is living as part of a community of what they describe as crusties, somewhere in Andalusia.

Through the night, they sit in the port, waiting for news of arrivals and departures, hoping they will learn something about Dilly. As they sit, their thoughts turn to their pasts in Ireland and Spain. There are hints of their criminal enterprises, their relationships and Dilly’s departure. At the heart of the story is the friendship between the two men, with all its ambiguities and murderous tenderness.

I have very strong and conflicting feelings about this book. The prose is beautiful, lyrical, haunting, funny, crude, violent. Barry has this incredible ability to capture the essence of a mood or a moment. His characters have insights quite at odds with their external appearances. Every moment is laden with subtext, as if there is another presence, illusory or magical, threaded through it.

The cities of Andalusia are beautifully evoked. These are places I love and I immediately recognised the crumbling beauty of the recent past, overlaid by the sheen of repackaged history and the devouring eyes of tourists. I love the sense of the port as a place of transition, where life is on hold, and worlds collide. (I also have spent grim hours waiting to get out of Algeciras.)

I did feel the underlying story was slight. I wasn’t expecting a conventional narrative but when I read a literary novel I want to feel I’ve learnt or grown or been moved in some way. I’m not sure that happened here, beyond the enjoyment of the language itself. The denouement (such as it is) comes too soon, and the end of the book is more fragments of backstory.

Still, if you can’t have everything, gorgeous prose, a haunting sense of place and a darkly comic dissection of friendship is certainly enough.

This is quite a slight story about two middle aged Irish men -Moss and Charlie - waiting at the port of Algeciras. The chapters spiral around and backwards and forward in time to reveal what has brought them to their current position and who they are waiting for.

Kevin Barry is a poet. His writing is really something special. He conveys a sense of place with great originality. Mainly though I loved the dialogue, especially between Charlie and Moss. Highly recommend this book.

Beautiful, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s real , it’s fiction. Good characterisation, believable dialogue- it’s all good

Perfect summer read

A novel almost written in reverse

The end of the story is in someways the beginning. Maurice and Charles Redmond, both are sitting waiting at the ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain. They are there waiting to see Maurice’s daughter, Dilly, who has been away for many years in some sort of sect in Tangier. This is just across the water and so they wait for the boat whilst remarking on the life they witness as they wait.

The novel then flashes back to events leading up to this. We go from Cork via Barcelona and Malaga to name but three places as their drug smuggling lifestyle is revealed and explored. There’s some rough and graphic scenes and lots of swearing but then this is a novel about drugs and the underbelly of society so Downton Abbey it ain’t.

It’s actually quite lyrical in places and the prose is unique: The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.” I mean, have you ever read such a description before?

There’s a lot of rough sentences, raw language and pure unbashed emotion. I’m not sure I enjoyed it but then I didn’t not enjoy it.

I might have to read more of this author to fully appreciate and understand what I’ve just read.

‘They talk of ageing and death. They talk of those they have crossed and those they have helped, of their first loves and lost loves, of their enemies and friends. They talk of the old days in Cork, and in Barcelona, and in London, and in Málaga, and in the ghosted city of Cádiz. They talk of the feelings of those places. They talk about being here, once again, on the coast of Barbary, as though on a magnet’s drag.’

Wowser. In what is turning out, for me, to be a vintage year of astonishing literary fiction, 2019 produces another book that has left me in awe of its skill, its dexterity, and its power to profoundly move.

Two Irish gangsters, in their early 50s, sit in the ferry terminal at Algeciras. They are waiting for a woman to arrive, either on or for the night boat to Tangier. She is Dilly Hearne, the two men are her father Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, his lifelong friend and enemy. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours the two men talk and reminisce, and as the narrative skips back in time we learn more of the history of these two characters, of their pain and sorrow and, yes, some nefarious drug-dealing. Chapter One opens with the line: ‘Would you say there’s any end in sight, Charlie?’, and the final chapter very nearly closes with the line: ‘Is there any end in sight, Maurice?’ Yes, we are very much in Waiting for Godot territory; indeed, the novel started out as a draft for a play which Barry chose to make a novel instead. For me, that’s entirely a good decision, for surely a play would suffer in contrast to Beckett’s classic? As it is, the book distils the essence of – indeed quotes from - the great Irish trilogy of Beckett, Joyce, and Yeats; it is a hymn to Irish identity and manhood and nostalgia, the seven distractions, as the book calls them: love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death. Maurice in particular, we learn from the flashbacks, has spent a wandering time, leaving and returning to Ireland as events carry him:
‘Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way it closes in.’

These are damaged men – and dangerous men, the kind of man you would precisely not want to meet on a dark night at a ferry terminal. Charlie has one badly damaged leg, Maurice has one badly damaged eye – these are important, as we learn just how they got these injuries and how they are, in a way, the outward illustration of their intertwined lives and the violence in their souls. A couple of times you physically flinch as a reader when you read some of the violence, brief though it is. From the pair’s opening encounter at the terminal with a boy called Benny and his dog the threat is just below the surface, and it doesn’t take long for it to reveal itself. And yet, and yet… Their story is beguiling, lyrical, and for some crazy reason you pity these two middle-aged men who are ‘old enough for the long view in either direction now.’

Kevin Barry writes the kind of sentences that draw you in with their poetic lilt and, bam!, a sudden jolt back to reality:
‘The world was at its cusp and turned to begin the long, slow slide into new light, new time, and he couldn’t fucking bear it.’

How can a book about two gangsters draw you in so much? That is its genius. The novel is full of tenderness and lyricism, of regret and pain; it is funny and raw and at times you might just need to put it down and walk away, to return later. Maurice and Charlie will remind you of yourself, and that is why you will like them, even if you know you shouldn’t. Ultimately it is a book about simply surviving, of accepting the past, and as they leave the ferry terminal at the end of the novel, in the pouring rain, you will want to believe, like Maurice, that it might stop raining soon. A dazzling book, which will definitely be one of my books of the year. 5 twinkling Irish stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

This is a mixture of funny and sad. It is a strange story which was not quite to my taste. I found some of the reflections on life to be slightly rambling. I probably would read another book by this author.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Night Boat to Tangier is a powerful and expressive novel with fascinating characters that have corrupted and harmed themselves and those around them. Kevin Barry's unforgiving poetic style nails the moments that linger well after the words are read.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are two aging, disfigured, Irish gangsters, waiting in a lifeless ferry terminal in Algeciras. They are waiting for Maurice’s daughter, Dilly, whom he hasn’t seen in 3 years. She will reportedly leave or arrive on a boat from Tangier within the next 24 hours. “Now the hours melt one into the other at the port of Algeciras. For the fading Irish gangsters, the long wait continues.” Life is a series of memories and as they wait for Dilly they reflect on their past, and flashbacks take us to their lives fuelled with sex, crime, drugs, alcohol, sex and drugs.
“They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven.”
As drug dealers they made money, as poor investors and a wasteful life they lost money. Haunting, Irish, Bad Luck with its mythical forces have been disturbed as Maurice tried to excavate a fairy mound with a building project. Not a bit of wonder his life has gone to shite. He lost the only woman he ever loved, Cynthia – Dilly’s mother, and his memories of her, torture his waking and sleeping moments. He knew he was bad for her but he also truly loved her too much to completely let go. As we get to know their demons and failings, and the reason Dilly left, do Maurice and Charlie deserve our empathy or forgiveness as our judgement gets blurred?

Kevin Barry is such an exceptional author, with writing to be relished for its striking eloquence and absorbing depth. The harsh dialogue and caustic history of Maurice and Charlie is so stunningly portrayed that your own imagination causes you to gasp and shudder. His books are shorter than average but contain meaning that would take books 3 times the length to achieve.

I would highly recommend this book and I’d like to thank Canongate and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC copy in return for an honest review.

Kevin Barry is one of my favourite Irish writers and I approached this, his latest novel with a sense of great anticipation and delight. His prose is sublime and lyrical, with his adept shifts in tone, his use of the vernacular, his inclusions of the fantastical, the bad luck of fairy mounds, spells and curses, and the mystics conversing with the dead. It has shades of Waiting for Godot, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, are old before their time, ageing has been Irish gangsters, searching for Maurice's daughter, the pretty, pale green eyed, dreadlocked, 23 year old, Dilly, whom they have not seen for 3 years at the Spanish ferry port of Algeciras. They used to be drug smugglers, tainted with the life of danger and fear that the drugs business guarantees, but the market fell through the floor, now its all about slavery and the misery of human trafficking.

The two still exude an air of menace, glimmers of piratical smiles and an edgy jauntiness, despite Charlie's limp and Maurice's damaged eye. They have information that Dilly will either be arriving or leaving on the night boat to Tangier, so they hand out flyers, interrogating the 'crusties' as they converse about a past that has led to their presence here at the ferry port. Their fractured cacophony of memories, often morbid and maudlin, take in Cork, Barcelona, Malaga, London and Cadiz, and the love of Maurice's life, Cynthia, Dilly's mother. Their fracturing lives encompass betrayal, the night at the Judas Iscariot club, the plethora of misfortune, lust and other women, the fights, paranoia, the fights and fury of drug fuelled lives, the violence, familial mental health issues going back to ancient times, of what it is to be an Irish man and a impoverished future that lies in tatters around them. And within the struggle to bear the weight of their past traumas and toxicity lies the answer as to why Dilly left.

This is a read to be savoured, for its language, for its depth, for the stellar and memorable characterisation, my only complaint is that the novel finished far too soon. It touches on profound issues of what it is to live, identity, love that leaves indelible permanent scars, masculinity, the price of criminality and violence, loss, grief, residing in a landscape of madness, and being a father. A riveting and absorbing novel that I know I will be reading again. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, has-been drug dealers in their fifties (and looking much older) have known each other for ever. Petty criminals in their teenage years, vicious dealers in their native Cork, best friends and enemies, they are united in their search for Maurice’s daughter, Dilly, in ‘Night Boat to Tangier’. It’s all that gives them purpose now. As Charlie muses at the end of the novel, ‘the prospect of another November is a mean taste at the back of his throat.’ The glory days are past and the men can only be ‘halfways hopeful’ about anything.
In this novel which takes the reader back and forth from Algeciras to Cork, Beara, London, Cadiz, Barcelona, Segovia and Malaga from 1994 – 2018, everything and nothing happens. Kevin Barry’s brilliant dialogue ensures that his readers simultaneously feel sorry for and are appalled by his anti-heroes. Maurice and Charlie are just as capable of self-knowledge and allegiance as they are of dishonesty and deception. In short, they are desperate men: desperate for the past they had hoped for and for a future that seems unattainable. Barry does not romanticise their narcotic-fuelled lives. They live in a grim, barbaric and ruthless world. And yet these men are capable of love and longing; for a parent, a woman, a child, even a dog. The couple are both terrifying and pitiable.
This is a gruelling yet engrossing read. Barry does not only invoke these men through their past and their here and now. It is what they don’t say to each other which is also so telling. Rather like a twenty-first century Estragon and Vladimir, they wait; not for Godot but for the Tangier night boat – ‘…this next boat coming in, this boat from Tangier? Or …going out?’ - and its promise of a gift which might make life bearable. And they hold us with their stories so that we wait with them too.
My thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

My first thought when I started this was “Waiting for Godot” but even now thinking of this book now makes me smile.

Two veteran rascals waiting on a the docks at Algeciras start reminiscing. As the night progresses many questions are answered, including why are they there, why Maurice has a problem with his eye, why Charlies has a limp, where is Dilly.
These two men are not nice but it’s impossible not have a soft spot for the people they are now sitting on the dockside.

I'm confident that most readers are going to love Night Boat to Tangier - it's a fast-paced, lyrical journey through Spain and Ireland with two bumbling ageing gangsters on the hunt for a lost daughter. Through a series of flashbacks we learn how they got to the port in Spain where the novel opens.

Despite all this, the book didn't quite work for me - I can't quite put a finger on why, but sometimes you get the feeling that had you read a book at a different time or in a different mood your reaction would've been totally different, and I'm pretty sure that's what happened here.