City of Bohane: A Novel

In this imaginative and unconventional novel, Irish author Kevin Barry creates an almost feudal, fictional city in the west of Ireland in the year 2053. Instead of being "futuristic," however, the novel is a throwback to simpler pagan times in which life is seen as the rule of the strong over the weak, with vengeance and its inevitable bloodshed a way of imposing control. The lack of real "civilization," which may or may not have existed in Bohane's past, seems to have no connection to any apocalypse, and, despite the 2053 setting, the town has no technology at all, and never has. Though Sweet Baba Jay (Jesus) is often mentioned and is accepted as a living force in the lives of some of the people, their behavior and actions in their dog-eat-dog world more closely resemble the ravening hordes which swept down in pagan times to wreak havoc on weaker tribes.

Having turned normal expectations upside down, the author ultimately creates a strange but often exciting and darkly humorous novel about the bizarre characters who inhabit Bohane, a tiny city on a western peninsula, its day-to-day life controlled by armed gangs and their bosses. Logan Hartnett, also called the Albino, the Long Fella, the `Bino, and H, is the "most ferocious power in the city," ruling the Back Trace, "a most evil labyrinth." He also controls Smoketown, an area of "hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, [and] needle alleys." The Cusacks, who live in the Northside Rises, are challenging his power, however, and the Gant Broderick, a man who has been gone from Bohane for twenty-five years, has now returned. When a Feud is declared, to much fanfare and the showing of flags and colors, all hell breaks loose. Complicating the issues is Hartnett's enlistment of the "sandpikeys," a group of Neanderthals led by Prince Tubby, who live at the tip of the peninsula.

Author Kevin Barry creates a whole new vocabulary for his characters, and their vernacular, though sometimes challenging to translate into standard English, can usually be understood through its context. The sand-pikeys are almost non-verbal.

In a peculiar but humorous twist, the author concentrates throughout the novel on describing all the characters' clothing as if the novel were a fashion magazine. At one point, Logan Hartnett wears "a pale green suit, slim-cut, of thin spring cotton, a pair of burnt-orange arsekickers with a pronounced, bulbous toe, a ruffle-fronted silver shirt...a purple neckscarf." This kind of description is matched throughout the novel with capsule descriptions of the characters themselves: Gant Broderick had "a pair of hands on him the size of a Belfast sinks." Harnett's wife Macu was "polite as the seeping of a poison," and Wolfie Stanners has a "chick pea head." Descriptions of places are equally vivid.

The novel is chock full of unusually quirky but simple characters as they engage in turf battles similar to those of most crime or Wild West novels. The confusion regarding the time of the novel and why the town feels more like 1953 than 2053, however, is strange, and the novel itself seems to be a sum of many unusual parts without an over-riding thematic structure or focus to bring it all together in a stylistic resolution. Barry is a whirlwind of incredible power and imagination whose work would seem to benefit from more control. Mary Whipple

In many ways the hype about this book (especially the saccharin description by Pete Hamill on the cover) is deserved, if you take the hype as hype and not a paean to the talent of Mr. Barry. "City of Bohane" suffers from the same problems as the "Fifty Shades of Grey" books do, they're are not as original as the reviewers think (think Jaqueline Suzanne and "Valley of the Dolls") and lack any true originality. Just because Barry has created a 'new' environment of the city he writes about and throws in new language 'you sketch, check' doesn't make this a masterpiece. One of the problems with 'speculative fiction' (this does take place in the future) that is taken into the mainstream is that the genre is unfamiliar to the 'casual' reading public.

For those who have been reading SF for the last thirty years, there is nothing at all original or different in Barry's novel. Some my be truly new to Barry but that doesn't mean that it's original to the public. In one review the book is compared to Ulysses. In that case it might be right, in that the book is pretentious, pedestrian and in parts totally unfathomable. This though doesn't make it great or even good literature. Every once in a while the 'literati' get it into their (little) heads that someone has written something different, but in most cases it's just that they don't understand the point and therefore get lost in their own views (like Donald Trump or Paris Hilton).

"If I find it hard to comprehend then it must be great literature, and if I find it great literature, it must be great literature". On the other hand maybe you just have terrible taste or no taste at all. "I think therefore I'm right", doesn't make it so. Some one always has to check that the Emperor is wearing clothes, and not walking around in his underwear, and then has to have the guts to tell him.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I couldn't make it past the 2nd chapter. It was almost as if it was written in a foreign lanquage and with a heavy overuse of adjectives and with many local words that were not understandable. I don't think this guy will make it as an author.

Read the book jacket blurbs and reviews and you would rightly imagine CITY OF BOHANE as an amalgam of [[ASIN:0393928098 A Clockwork Orange (Norton Critical Editions)]], [[ASIN:B003ZD9DUC Mad Max (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo in Blu-ray Packaging)]], and the [[ASIN:B002XUBDVK Gangs of New York (Remastered) [Blu-ray]]], not to mention graphic comics, particularly [[ASIN:1593963149 Frank Miller's Complete Sin City Library]]. I might even toss in [[ASIN:B002TOL8RY The Godfather (Coppola Restoration) [Blu-ray]]] as I think back on the film's opening scene wherein the obsequious mortician requests help in avenging the stolen reputation of his daughter and an almost corresponding pleading in BOHANE made of Logan Hartnett, leader of the Hartnett Fancy gang, to revenge the honor of a cuckolded butcher. While it's true you can find elements of all these influences in Kevin Barry's debut novel, along with traditional story lines of rival lovers and the intrigue of ascension to power, you'll also discover much that is special and unique, features that raise CITY OF BOHANE well above the usual fare of current fiction.

The writing stands out, first and foremost. I'd compare reading CITY OF BOHANE to listening to a long musical composition, or hearing a storyteller spin his tale in his own poetical language. Barry has drawn on Irish slang (helpful dictionaries available online but most words easily gasped in context) and his own syntactical inventiveness to bring his future society, which rings strongly of the primordial, to life. This may be one of the most vivid novels you'll read this year, or for many more.

Here's a sample describing the rising influence of the colorful, cunning, and coldblooded Jenni Ching, a principal player, who would be dynamite to watch in a film adaptation, as weirdly enticing as Lisbeth Salander: "The girls started to run in a wilding pack in the Trace. There were all-girl roisters in the midnite yards. You were a girl in Bohane, in the springtime of '54, you had a shkelp in your inside pocket, and a stogie on the chomp, and you walked the wynds with that Ching-patented S'town glide." That's 2054 and Jenni is 17.

And another of boss Hartnett taking his ease at the Ho Pee Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, with the missus, Macu, and Ho Pee boss-lady, Jenni: "--Mr Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, and he was there breezing on the moment, and with a toothpick he worked lumps of cashew from the gaps between his yellow teeth. He was all got up in a wowser of a straight-cut grey vinyl suit--its sheen catching the Ho Pee's fairy-light glow--and there was a matching grey vinyl mackintosh laid over the back of his chair."

On and on Barry goes, with descriptions of buildings, people, their fashion (colorfully eclectic and depicted in photographic detail), their personal habits, their thoughts, and their oftentimes unrestrained viciousness.

And lest you wonder, well enough, but what about the story, you'll find two intertwined. One deals with Hartnett's sense that he has little time left as boss of the Hartnett Fancy, that some close may be marshalling against him, and the intrigue of the maneuverings and his counters. The second concerns the return of the Gant, former leader of the Fancy, gone 25 years, heartbroken over losing Macu, intent upon renewing what he remembers they shared. Of course, she is wife to Hartnett.

Above, I described Bohane as primordial. Bohane seethes with tribal passion, with offenses leading directly to death, with battles resulting from insult and murder, and from the need to maintain strength and power, all exercised in raw personal contact. That's to say, in this future city of Bohane, you will see no cars, no computers, no phones or cell phones, and, most intriguing, no firearms. In Bohane, the Fancy, the Norrie, the sand-pikey inflict damage and death with the knife, with any bludgeoning tool at hand, with fists, and with steel-capped stomping boots. There's something especially visceral and intimate about these methods of death dealing, as you'll see if, as the Sweet Baba Jay would want, you choose to read CITY OF BOHANE.

Highly recommended for Barry's lyrical style, for memorable characters, and for a distinct retelling of tales as old as time.

As I began this book, I was instantly entranced by the rich density of the language, the Irish street patois that turns descriptions and dialogue into a form of Celtic poetry. I felt like I was greeting a spiritual and esthetic successor to William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Sean O'Casey wrapped in one package. Next, I became aware of a story that aspires to the epic proportions of the perennial struggle for ascendency among both individual leaders and their constituent groups with a love triangle mixed in for good measure. I was in heaven. I read each page slowly, sometimes reading it again to savor the colorful argot.

The city of Bohane is a mythical peninsula on the western shore of Ireland. It is a character in the drama whose very atmosphere gives off an ominous feeling of danger and the constant threat of imminent violence. There are wonderful, fascinating characters, none of whom would be described as virtuous. Some would be survivors, and many would be the vanquished dead. The power game is all. It trumps everything else. Cynicism is omnipresent, but here paranoids really do have enemies at every turn.

For the first three-quarters of the book, I was ready to canonize it as the next "Huckleberry Finn", "Catch-22", "Catcher in the Rye" for our time. Then a funny thing happened. It almost seemed like the author ran out of energy for maintaining the patois and, worse, for staying with the power conflict that had been building throughout the entire book and seeing it through to the end. The results were duly announced, but the readers were cheated of being there for the final battles. I felt so disappointed: "City of Bohane" had the stuff for immortality and let it slide away. How could Kevin Barry do that? Where were his editors or his friends? He came that close. It's still well worth reading, and I will immediately buy and read anything else this guy writes. He's got the real goods.

I usually don't like books with the word 'Bohane' in the title, but this was a pleasant surprise. Sprawling, funny, fierce.

Kevin Barry is going to be somebody. That's what I thought when I read his apocalyptic short story in The New Yorker, "Fjord of Killary", a year or two ago. This sent me searching the web, where I found his previous short story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, available from a small Irish literary press by way of an independent overseas bookseller. Kevin Barry already is somebody, I thought when I read those tales: He's an heir to William Trevor, like Banville and Toibin. But this one's ten or twenty years younger than those, so the line is growing at a natural, Irish pace.

In his first novel, published last year in Europe and this year in the US, Barry explores the devolution of western society and culture in a futuristic tale that is anything but science fiction. The language of the book, both the dialogue and the narration, represent what will become of the English language by 2053 if the current course holds. A melange of hip-hop drug-running street-slang wafts through the streets of a fictional coastal town in the West of Ireland, where the polluted Bohane river emerges from the Irish countryside--aka "The Big Nothin', ya sketch?--to flow through the city of the same name to a blackened sea. On the south side of the river, Smoketown is a place of sex parlors and opium dens, all run on graft, young hoors shaved head to toe, and tribal inheritances and alliances soon to be shaken yet again when an old chieftain rolls back into town. Up the slope on the other side of the river, the Northside Rises are home to another nest of criminals and hooligans. In between, what serves as the establishment--even the blue bloods are cynical and uncouth in this land--are soon needing to prepare for the worst. Nary a cell-phone or a laptop or a satellite dish in sight, gang fights and melees are fought with knuckles and knives and old-time savagery. And there is hell to pay, one way or another.

Kevin Barry. Check out any of it, including City of Bohane. A young Irish writer of this caliber is a new world treasure.

This is the best book I have read in 10 years, I think. I e-stalk Kevin Barry now in hopes that he will be speaking in my city sometime soon.

This book is not for everyone. The language is profanely poetical, a cross between that of A Clockwork Orange and that of Joyce's Ulysses. The atmosphere is violent--the TV series Deadwood and the movie The Gangs of New York spring to mind. If you make it to the end, you will have experienced a powerful first novel about a chaotic corner of Ireland sometime in the future.

The next book I read was "Meetings with Remarkable Men" by Gurdjieff - the first chapter dedicated to his father. One of his father's favorite remarks is this

"A representation of Hell--a stylish shoe."

Indeed.