That Old Country Music

In an interview with The TLS, Kevin Barry was asked, "Which author (living or dead) do you think is most overrated?" and his reply was "I shall courteously refrain from naming names but any of the acclaimed authors (and there are many) whose work is essentially humourless. High seriousness on the page is always the giveaway mark of mediocrity. The very best work is always funny."

This is interesting because this collection of 11 short stories contains a lot of sad people in sad situations. It is one of Barry’s gifts as a writer to write about sad situations in a way that makes you smile or even laugh out loud. There is humour in the darkness and a lot of it comes from the wonderful turn of phrase that Barry seems to be able to summon up whatever the circumstance he is writing about. Some of the smiles are smiles of recognition that he has captured something with his words.

The other remarkable thing Barry can do when writing is write a short story that feels complete but leaves you wishing it was longer. I have read all of Barry’s novels but this is my first experience with his shorter work. I have read other short story collections where the stories felt that they needed to be longer because they were incomplete or where the stories felt like they had actually run their course about halfway through. Telling a good short story is an art. And Kevin Barry is very good at it.

Take the opening story here where a young man meets a young girl but is totally unprepared for the way love will open him up.

"Tears welled up in his eyes and he had to make out it was the breeze off the river was the cause of them.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t realise I was so on my own,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to be brutally f**ken honest about things.’"
(asterisks mine to try to avoid offending anyone!).

And a few pages later, we read:

"He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome."

The course of true love ne’er runs straight, but you will have to read the story to find out whether there is a happy outcome and whether our protagonist can actually handle it.

I think my favourite story in the collection is “Extremadura (Until Night Falls)” in which a vagrant crouches by a dog at the edge of town in Spain and watches the people whilst remembering why he has left Ireland and found himself wandering in a foreign country. I actually read this one twice before moving on to the next.

This is only a short book (I am really not sure I believe the Goodreads information that has it at 240 pages, but my NetGalley ARC has no page numbers), but it is full of Barry’s trademark beautiful sentences and turns of phrase. It tells us darkly humorous and moving stories of people, as the blurb says "on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope". It is a pleasure to read.

4.5 stars and highly recommended.

This is another fine collection of stories from Kevin Barry whose prolificness doesn't seem to undermine the quality of his writing. The 11 stories cover love, death, vagrancy, relationship-breakdown and artistic breakdown, siding mainly with outsiders, and they share a sad comic intensity that might be regarded as typically Irish if that wasn't a cliche. The recurring phrase, "much of a muchness", sums up the stories in a positive way in that they are consistent depictions of a world like our own but more entertaining. The first two stories, "The Coast of Leitrim" and "Deer Season" I liked best but they are all worth reading and savouring.

‘Did you not hear who's dead?’ asks Con McCarthy of Limerick in the story, “Who's-dead McCarthy” in this sparkling new collection of Barry's stories.
Much of the psychogeography of rural Ireland is concentrated here as sad and serious themes rub along inside a comic, even jaunty, voicing.
Emotional territory is staked out in journeys, places, misunderstandings, love, death and song. The Ox and Bluestack mountain ranges, the Southern Polish city of Stalowa Wola and Moose Jaw, Canada all make cameo appearances, thickening the texture of what living in Ireland might mean.
My favourite story, ‘The Coast of Leitrim' contains the line, “in fact the shortest length of coast belonging to any county in Ireland'. Seamus then corrects himself: ‘I mean barring the landlocked counties'.
This whimsical pedantry tells us much about Seamus Ferris; his shy but passionate courtship of ‘Katherine' turns by the end of the story into a headlong gallop to Southern Poland.
A strong imaginative empathy pulses through this varied collection. The rural hinterland, immigrant and emigrant stories and a deeply sensitive ear for the cadences and lilt of Irish speech patterns are major elements of this writer's work.

Some heartfelt stories of longing and loneliness here, emotionally charged in that understated way we have come to expect from Irish writers these days and at which Kevin Barry is a master.

I particularly enjoyed the first one ‘The Coast of Leitrim’ where a young man falls in love but is afraid of committing his heart. ‘Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome.’ ‘To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it.’

My other favourite, which shares some of the same angst, is the title story ‘That Old Country Music’ in which a young girl is disappointed in her dreams of a different life, yet resigned to its inevitability. ‘The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that old burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the old tune’s circle and turn - it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.’

Looming over many of the lives here are the mountains of west Ireland, the wilderness just beyond, and Kevin Barry conjures this atmosphere so well.
‘The day was up and about itself.
The fields trembled.
Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.’

A collection of stories to be savoured, beautiful writing. Highly recommended.

This is a beautifully realised collection. The prose is so measured, so considered. The voices in Kevin Barry’s short stories are deftly linked by time and place. The stories are interwoven with tropes and a vernacular that pull them together with tenderness and a mordant wit. Barry has a light, elegiac idiom that rings true for anyone from this part of the world; Donegal, Sligo. He imbues the landscape with a mysticism that touches on a psychogeographical intensity. This felt like a homecoming.

I came across Mr Barry when he was nominated for the Booker prize last year for his novel Night Boat to Tangier, an outstanding book in every respect. That Old Country Music is also excellent. A great collection of short stories from a unique writer. The writing is packed with warmth and dark humour, even as the world it explores is a little bleak in places. Highly recommended.

Another wonderful short story collection from Kevin Barry! This time, the stories have slightly happier endings... very unlike his previous stories! But they are clever and witty as always and I love how he writes about sadness and melancholy, with dark humour and care. This is a wonderful collection and feels very short. An easy and enjoyable read.

In the stories of That Old Country Music, there’s often an air of loneliness and dissatisfaction. For every character there’s a feeling of heartbreak coming or just gone, which is appropriate, as Barry manages to encompass entire life tales in the straightforward telling of a few events. No matter whether the tale stretches from train ride to full life (‘Roma Kid’) or takes place in a few short hours (‘This Old Country Music’, ‘Toronto and the State of Grace’) there is the feeling that one has gone on an immense journey from A to B, with C continuing well beyond the last word. And, crucially, enjoyed it. Barry keeps a light and humorous touch in the bleakest situations, with a kind pragmatism to the summing up of each character’s quirks. His descriptions of people, landscape, items, even, are succinct but cinematic – the hills fair roll out in front of your eyes.

Throughout there’s also the sense of inevitability. The characters in these stories make their choices - of course they do - but often with the sense that their fate has been decided no matter what they do: the world has a role that must be filled, by someone – whether that is the death-caller of ‘Who’s-Dead McCarthy’; the cottage Don Juans of ‘Old Stock’; the watcher of the Canavans in ‘Ox Mountain Death Song’; the fooled lovers of ‘St Catherine in the Fields’ and title story ‘That Old Country Music’ – and they must be the ones to fill it, even as much of the story forewarns them of the shoes they are stepping into. In the context of this reading, the narrator of ‘Extramedura’ seems to be what remains of one of these other characters, doomed to watch the tale they once were in play out again and again, fulfilling the promise of heartbreak coming and going with closing lines to so simple and sad that they’ll make you want to put the book down and sigh for a while.

All of this is the mark, as you’d expect from Barry, of a writer with absolute control over his stories. I wanted to wallow in the world he’s created here, one that’s old and new, peopled with the bleak and beautiful. What struck me most, though, is the kindness of the collection – the events that take place are not always kind, but there seems to me to be a sweetness and warmth of feeling throughout, a belief in the basic goodness of the world, even when it’s bad. Loved it.

Kevin Barry's collection of short stories bear all the trademarks of his vital, vibrant, poetic and lyrical prose, his beautiful rich textured descriptions are to be savoured, then there is his compassion and humanity in the offbeat, occasionally cunning, criminal, feckless, sexually confident, fastidious, sensitive, addled and flawed characters he creates. There is dark humour to be found in these stories, with their focus on broken hearts, the sorrow, torments, cruelty and sadness of love, the well worn shapes of desire, erotica, lust, loss, heartbreak which can hold the seeds of madness and insanity. His depiction of the ancient Emerald Isle overflows with the psychic, a magic, a spiritualism, the tangible soul and atmosphere of the land, its bogs, its beauty, mountains, and hissing seas, emanating a timelessness, brimming with moodiness and feelings, brooding, singing its beguiling music for those that can hear.

The people, families and communities are deeply connected, an earthy connection that often lives beyond death such as can be found in Old Stock, the death of Uncle Aldo and an old inheritance. Love can be a tricky affair, as it is for 35 year old Seamus Ferry, bedevilled by the fear of committing his heart to his, the Polish Katherine Zielinski, driven by an inner compulsion to destroy all that he loves. Collecting old folk songs that have yet to be recorded leads to the discovery of a troubling song, of matters of the heart, all its destructive powers, the deranged souls, its ephemeral nature, incorporating erotic wickedness and greed. Con McCarthy is the connoisseur of death, an expert, elaborating on it in depth, with a particular relish of the slapstick death as he rearranges his face for each death that he relates. A grim but necessary and vital messenger of death for his city.

As always with short story collections, some are more substantial than others, but with Barry, every single one is a revelation, a tribute to the transformative and artful power of his storytelling, even within the short story format, in which he is entirely at home. My favourite stories were Ox Mountain Death Song, Toronto and the State of Grace, and Roethke in the Bughouse, which tells of the American poet Theodore Roethke, married to Beatrice, on the island of Inishbofin, having a breakdown, to be committed to a mainland psychiatric hospital. It's always a sheer joy to read virtually anything Barry writes, as indeed these short stories are, but I did on occasion hanker for greater length, and I was shocked at how quickly I reached the end of the book, it all seemed too brief an experience. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.