Batting for the City of Bohane

IF Kevin Barry was under pressure, it didn’t show. Smiling from ear to ear, the former Limerick journalist launched his debut novel, City of Bohane, at the Druid Lane Theatre in Galway during the recent Cúirt International Festival of Literature.

After winning the prestigious Rooney Prize for Literature in 2007 for his collection of stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, and publishing in anthologies such as The New Yorker, Granta: The Irish Short Story and Best European Fiction 2011, expectations surrounding Kevin’s new novel could have been weighing heavily on the author. But there was no hint of it.
“It’s great to see lots of faces who were at my first book launch four years ago,” he told the packed theatre, adding, “Daniel O’Donnell always says that repeat customers are the key to a long career in show business.”
As he read from the first two chapters of City of Bohane, the audience got a strong sense of the fun Kevin had while writing it over three months. He loves the performance of reading aloud, he contorts his face to capture a character’s accent, he tips his shoulder to suggest their gait and he holds his arm out expansively as if to reveal their view of the titular city. 
The novel is set in the early 2050s in Bohane, a fictional city on the west coast of Ireland. It’s a colourful, cartoon city of tribal feuds, sleaze and corruption ruled by the overlord Logan Hartnett who is confronted by the return of his arch enemy, Gant Broderick, after 25 years in exile.
Early in the novel, the unnamed narrator sketches an outline of the city. “Bohane could be a tricky read,” he suggests. “It has the name of an insular and contrary place and certainly, we are given to bouts of rage and hilarity, which makes us unpredictable.” Its citizens, meanwhile, “need the inner fire that comes from a meat diet and voluminous drinking”.
The way Kevin acts out his reading is hardly surprising given the importance he places on accent and dialogue in his work.
“Accents are critical for me,” he has said. “I work from the ear and when the accent changes – as it does every second mile in Ireland – the meaning changes, the humour changes, the soul changes.”
In the novel, the narrator describes the Bohane accent as “flat and harsh along the consonants, sing-song and soupy on the vowels, betimes vaguely Caribbean”. Before reading from his book, Kevin revealed his inspiration for this. “I’m going to read it in a Bohane accent,” he joked. “Which is a bit like my own – but a bit more so.”
Born in 1969, Kevin Barry grew up in Ballinacurra Gardens in Limerick and attended CBS Sexton Street. He enrolled in a course in European Studies in what is now the University of Limerick but, in less than a week, left to start work as a journalist.
After spells as a reporter for the Limerick Tribune and the Limerick Post, Kevin became a columnist for the Irish Examiner and Glasgow Sunday Herald. He has written about travel and literature for international publications such as The Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald.
As well as a novel, short stories and journalism, Kevin has written a stage adaptation of his short story There Are Little Kingdoms, a short film The Ballad of Kid Kanturk, a feature-length film Memorabilia, a puppet show Burn The Bad Lamp and graphic stories with the artist Ale Mercado.
While he always wanted to write fiction, he misses journalism and is quick to acknowledge the skills he learned from it.
“I greatly enjoyed working as a freelance journalist because it gets you out of the house and it gets you talking to people,” he said. “But it wasn’t satisfying all of my cravings and I knew that I needed to work with the other side of my brain – the darker, murkier side. I think journalism is useful training for a writer. You realise you don’t have to sit around waiting for inspiration and that you can always work if you just put your mind to it.”
Though he initially struggled with the discipline, Kevin started to find his voice when he became more disciplined in his approach to fiction writing. Now he starts early in the morning, as this is when he does his best writing and finds himself at his desk seven days a week despite, not because, of the rewards.
“There is little money in writing and what little there is shrinks with every passing year,” he said.
“But you don’t do it for the money; you do it so that you can breathe. You mightn’t be getting rich and famous but you’re free. It’s a kind of freedom.”
Ideas for Kevin’s fiction usually come from a sound, like a conversation overheard and if it stays in his head, that’s Kevin’s sign to work at it but he can’t force the idea.
“The more you write fiction, the more you realise that it doesn’t happen in the front of your brain,” he once explained. “It comes out of the subconscious. What you have to do is make a pact with yourself to be available if something does.”
Early critical reaction to City of Bohane has been mixed but Kevin’s vivid setting and inventive characters will mesmerise readers. The title alone of the novel was a revelation to Kevin’s editor, Alex Bowler.
“The name of the novel was explained to me two years ago in no uncertain terms when I made my pitch to acquire this novel,” Alex joked in his refined English accent at the launch. “I was calling it The City of Bohane. But Kevin said: ‘No, no, no: Boh-A-ne.’ I’d never heard a vowel spoken in that way before or realised just how aggressively you can hit an ‘a’ in the middle of a word.”