Beatlebone

A searing, surreal novel that blends fantasy and reality—and Beatles fandom—from one of literature’s most striking contemporary voices, author of the international sensation City of Bohane

It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought eleven years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to calm his unquiet soul in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
     Beatlebone is a tour de force of language and literary imagination that marries the most improbable elements to the most striking effect. It is a book that only Kevin Barry would attempt, let alone succeed in pulling off—a Hibernian high wire act of courage, nerve, and great beauty.
He sets out for the place as an animal might, as though on some fated migration. There is nothing rational about it nor even entirely sane and this is the great attraction. He’s been travelling half the night east and nobody has seen him—if you keep your eyes down, they can’t see you. Across the strung-out skies and through the eerie airports and now he sits in the back of the old Mercedes. His brain feels like a city centre and there is a strange tingling in the bones of his monkey feet. Fuck it. He will deal with it. The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night. There’s something monkeyish, isn’t there, about his feet? Also his gums are bleeding. But he won’t worry about that now—he’ll worry about it in a bit. Save one for later. Trees and fields pass by in the grainy night. Monkeys on the fucking brain lately as a matter of fact. Anxiety? He hears a blue yonderly note from somewhere, perhaps it’s from within. Now the driver’s sombre eyes show up in the rearview—

It’s arranged, he says. There should be no bother whatsoever. But we could be talking an hour yet to the hotel out there?

Driver has a very smooth timbre, deep and trustworthy like a newscaster, the bass note and brown velvet of his voice, or the corduroy of it, and the great chunky old Merc cuts the air quiet as money as they move. 

John is tired but not for sleeping.

No fucking pressmen, he says. And no fucking photogs.

In the near dark there is the sense of trees and fields and hills combining. The way that you can feel a world form around you on a lucky night in the springtime. He rolls the window an inch. He takes a lungful of cool starlight for a straightener. Blue and gasses. That’s lovely. He is tired as fuck but he cannot get his head down. It’s the Maytime—the air is thick with and tastes of it—and he’s all stirred up again.

Where the fuck are we, driver?

It’d be very hard to say. He quite likes this driver.

He stretches out his monkey toes. It’s the middle of the night and fucking nowhere. He sighs heavily—this starts out well enough but it turns quickly to a dull moaning. Not a handsome development. Driver’s up the rearview again. As though to say gather yourself. For a moment they watch each other gravely; the night moves. The driver has a high purple colour—madness or eczema—and his nose looks dead and he speaks now in a scolding hush:

That’s going to get you nowhere.

Driver tips the wheel, a soft glance; the road is turned. They are moving fast and west. Mountains climb the night sky. The cold stars travel. They are getting higher. The air changes all the while. By a scatter of woods there is a medieval scent. By a deserted house on a sudden turn there is an occult air. How to explain these fucking things? They come at last by the black gleaming sea and this place is so haunted

or at least it is for me

and there is a sadness, too, close in, like a damp and second skin. Out here the trees have been twisted and shaped by the wind into strange new guises—he can see witches, ghouls, creatures-of-nightwood, pouting banshees, cackling hoods.

It’s a night for the fucking bats, he says.

I beg your pardon?

What I mean to say is I’m going off my fucking bean back here.

I’m sorry?
 
That’s all you can be.
 
He lies back in his seat, pale and wakeful, chalk-white come­dian; his sore bones and age. No peace, no sleep, no meaning. And the sea is out there and moving. He hears it drag on its cables—a slow, rusted swooning. Which is poetical, to a man in the dark hours, in his denim, and lonely—it moves him.

Driver turns, smiling sadly—

You’ve the look of a poor fella who’s caught up in himself.

Oh?

What’s it’s on your mind?

Not easy to say.

Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick—these are the things on his mind.

Also—

How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?

I just want to get to my island, he says.

He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks. That he might scream his fucking lungs out and scream the days into nights and scream to the stars by night—if stars there are and the stars come through.
  • WINNER | 2015
    Goldsmiths Book Prize
  • SHORTLIST | 2015
    James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Praise for Beatlebone:

A 2015 New York Times Notable Book
 
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2015

Beatlebone is a novel that takes its reader to the edge—of the Western world, of sanity, of fame, of words. But it also takes us to the very edge of the novel form, where it meets its notorious doppelgänger, autobiography. Its compulsive narrative of one of the last century’s great musicians and pop icons gradually, and without a hint of contrivance, becomes a startling and original meditation on the uncanny relationship of a writer to his character. Intricately weaving and blurring fiction and life, Beatlebone embodies beautifully this prize’s spirit of creative risk. We’re proud to crown it our winner."
—Josh Cohen, Chair of Judges, Goldsmiths Prize 2015
 
“Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven’t yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox—razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation.... And just when you think you’ve seen everything and that there’s nothing else the beast can unleash on his unsuspecting reader, he unveils a literary device this reader has never encountered before—a peek behind the curtain where the wizard wields the controls…. Well, you’ll have to read the book.
 
And it works. It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast. You see the trick of it? No fear.”
—Steve Earle, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Mr. Barry’s language is still poetic and reaching and imaginative, but now in effortless service to more substantial themes, in particular love and ‘the way that time moves.’ As the novel’s attention alternates between Mr. Barry’s real trip to the island and John’s made up one, the identities of the two men—both artists, both marked by the loss of their mothers—mingle, until their stories begin to overlap more and more exactly, and finally the two become indivisible, ghosts of each other across the decades. The effect is beautiful, reminiscent at different moments of Virginia Woolf and Geoff Dyer… Even as the journeys of the author and his protagonist merge, Mr. Barry and Lennon remain stubbornly distinct. But perhaps what ultimately makes this a great novel is its author’s exploration of the ways that sometimes, in art, we do get to become each other—kind of.”
—Charles Finch, The New York Times
 
“The story is intriguing, not least because it's rare to come upon a lesser-known narrative about the Beatles — and yet the unexpected turn of Barry's novel, which imagines a 1978 trip by Lennon to Dorinish, is that it isn't really about the singer at all…. Barry…is a genius of the language, teasing out impressionistic riffs that channel emotion into words.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“[E]xtraordinary… Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone is a strange, intense and slightly incoherent extended fantasy about two months that John Lennon spent in Ireland in 1978, fleeing an invasive press while searching for sanctuary on a remote island he had purchased on a whim. As unlikely as this premise seems, Barry is largely able to carry it off by force of imagination and by a super-charged prose style that borrows heavily from James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and other past masters of extravagant Irish lyricism at its high-modernist peak.
—Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post
 
Beatlebone is glorious, savory stuff—part lark, part meditation, and a tiny part excavation.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
 
“Barry has a wry, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and an equally affecting eye for character traits.”
—Liam Callanan, San Francisco Chronicle
 
Beatlebone, the novel, reads as brilliant liner notes for a nervous breakdown, a hip, alternative history for Lennon's lost years. We know John never made a sea-mammal inspired album. We are all too well aware that Mark David Chapman is waiting in the wings. We realize the ‘John Lennon’ in Barry's book is a confection, a creation, a sleight of hand. Yet somehow readers may feel they are getting close to the real flesh and blood human. There are places he remembered, and in his life, he loved them all. Perhaps an island in Clew Bay was one of them.”
—Jean Zimmerman, NPR.org
 
"There’s music to Barry’s prose: Smart rhythms dart through his sentences; taut bridges join his paragraphs; the tinge of hysteria serves to animate his characters and their surroundings. His dialogue is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, catching the idiom of the local life, and, in Beatlebone, nailing John Lennon, the wittiest and darkest Beatle, spot on."
—Fred Kaplan, Slate

"...[T]his glorious lark feels canonical."
—Boris Kachka, New York Magazine, "7 Books You Need to Read This November"

"Beatlebone is an odyssey of the mind. Its ever-shifting modes vividly recall James Joyce’s Ulysses.... The island simply represents an idea. What’s at stake in his getting to the island? We never really know, which is a tricky feat to pull off. Barry succeeds by parsing John’s limbo state so clearly and vividly."
—Josh Cook, Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Nearly every sentence exhibits the care and craft of a poet. Barry doesn’t waste a word.”
—Gregg LaGambina , The A.V. Club
 
It’s a musical fever dream of a book that sounds weirder than it is; Barry’s perfectly honed storytelling voice sweeps readers happily through decades and across rough seas.”
—Becky Ohlsen, BookPage
 
“Barry’s prose is at once dreamy and direct, ethereal and grounded.”
—Eric Swedlund, Paste Magazine.com

"Beatlebone is a perfect novel for someone who loves good fiction, or who wants to dive into the human condition, or any Beatles fan."
Anders Carlson, The Kansas City Star

"'The examined life turns out to be a pain in the stones,' Lennon says near the end of Beatlebone. But Barry’s keenly worded quest is worth the trip."
Heather Scott Partington, Las Vegas Weekly

"[Beatlebone is] a gloriously freewheeling tale imagining an attempt by John Lennon to visit the island he had bought off the coast of Mayo in 1967... Barry weaves his own odyssey to “Beatle Island” into a tale of fame, freaks, bad liquor and bad weather, with Lennon—angry, brilliant, sarcastic, tender, on a doomed quest for artistic release and his Irish roots—at its centre."
Justine Jordan, The Guardian

"Mingling surreal black humour and breakdown, Beatlebone is a wild cascade of language and imagery, rich in wordplay and referential resonance."
Lee Langley, The Spectator

"Casually lyrical, formally inventive, funny and moving, [Beatlebone] is a small wonder."
Theo Tait, Sunday Times

"Too often, novels about great artists shy away from attending to those very creative processes that made them great. Beatlebone is a committed, brutal portrait."
Tom Williams, Literary Review

"A famous musician's 1978 pilgrimage to an island off the west coast of Ireland takes several detours, abetted by his memories and his minder, in this original, lyrical, genre-challenging work... Nothing at all like Barry's award-winning debut novel, this may be a risky follow-up, but it's intriguing at every turn, and Barry's prose can be as mesmerizing as some of his hero's songs."
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Barry, a great poet of a novelist...has created an unusual novel, remarkable in structure as well as tone, that channels the contradictory nature of Lennon himself."
Booklist, starred review
 
[Reminds] us how writing merges memory and imagination to connect the living and the dead.”
Publishers Weekly
© Olivia Smith
KEVIN BARRY is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland. View titles by Kevin Barry

About

A searing, surreal novel that blends fantasy and reality—and Beatles fandom—from one of literature’s most striking contemporary voices, author of the international sensation City of Bohane

It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought eleven years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to calm his unquiet soul in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
     Beatlebone is a tour de force of language and literary imagination that marries the most improbable elements to the most striking effect. It is a book that only Kevin Barry would attempt, let alone succeed in pulling off—a Hibernian high wire act of courage, nerve, and great beauty.

Excerpt

He sets out for the place as an animal might, as though on some fated migration. There is nothing rational about it nor even entirely sane and this is the great attraction. He’s been travelling half the night east and nobody has seen him—if you keep your eyes down, they can’t see you. Across the strung-out skies and through the eerie airports and now he sits in the back of the old Mercedes. His brain feels like a city centre and there is a strange tingling in the bones of his monkey feet. Fuck it. He will deal with it. The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night. There’s something monkeyish, isn’t there, about his feet? Also his gums are bleeding. But he won’t worry about that now—he’ll worry about it in a bit. Save one for later. Trees and fields pass by in the grainy night. Monkeys on the fucking brain lately as a matter of fact. Anxiety? He hears a blue yonderly note from somewhere, perhaps it’s from within. Now the driver’s sombre eyes show up in the rearview—

It’s arranged, he says. There should be no bother whatsoever. But we could be talking an hour yet to the hotel out there?

Driver has a very smooth timbre, deep and trustworthy like a newscaster, the bass note and brown velvet of his voice, or the corduroy of it, and the great chunky old Merc cuts the air quiet as money as they move. 

John is tired but not for sleeping.

No fucking pressmen, he says. And no fucking photogs.

In the near dark there is the sense of trees and fields and hills combining. The way that you can feel a world form around you on a lucky night in the springtime. He rolls the window an inch. He takes a lungful of cool starlight for a straightener. Blue and gasses. That’s lovely. He is tired as fuck but he cannot get his head down. It’s the Maytime—the air is thick with and tastes of it—and he’s all stirred up again.

Where the fuck are we, driver?

It’d be very hard to say. He quite likes this driver.

He stretches out his monkey toes. It’s the middle of the night and fucking nowhere. He sighs heavily—this starts out well enough but it turns quickly to a dull moaning. Not a handsome development. Driver’s up the rearview again. As though to say gather yourself. For a moment they watch each other gravely; the night moves. The driver has a high purple colour—madness or eczema—and his nose looks dead and he speaks now in a scolding hush:

That’s going to get you nowhere.

Driver tips the wheel, a soft glance; the road is turned. They are moving fast and west. Mountains climb the night sky. The cold stars travel. They are getting higher. The air changes all the while. By a scatter of woods there is a medieval scent. By a deserted house on a sudden turn there is an occult air. How to explain these fucking things? They come at last by the black gleaming sea and this place is so haunted

or at least it is for me

and there is a sadness, too, close in, like a damp and second skin. Out here the trees have been twisted and shaped by the wind into strange new guises—he can see witches, ghouls, creatures-of-nightwood, pouting banshees, cackling hoods.

It’s a night for the fucking bats, he says.

I beg your pardon?

What I mean to say is I’m going off my fucking bean back here.

I’m sorry?
 
That’s all you can be.
 
He lies back in his seat, pale and wakeful, chalk-white come­dian; his sore bones and age. No peace, no sleep, no meaning. And the sea is out there and moving. He hears it drag on its cables—a slow, rusted swooning. Which is poetical, to a man in the dark hours, in his denim, and lonely—it moves him.

Driver turns, smiling sadly—

You’ve the look of a poor fella who’s caught up in himself.

Oh?

What’s it’s on your mind?

Not easy to say.

Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick—these are the things on his mind.

Also—

How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?

I just want to get to my island, he says.

He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks. That he might scream his fucking lungs out and scream the days into nights and scream to the stars by night—if stars there are and the stars come through.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2015
    Goldsmiths Book Prize
  • SHORTLIST | 2015
    James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Reviews

Praise for Beatlebone:

A 2015 New York Times Notable Book
 
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2015

Beatlebone is a novel that takes its reader to the edge—of the Western world, of sanity, of fame, of words. But it also takes us to the very edge of the novel form, where it meets its notorious doppelgänger, autobiography. Its compulsive narrative of one of the last century’s great musicians and pop icons gradually, and without a hint of contrivance, becomes a startling and original meditation on the uncanny relationship of a writer to his character. Intricately weaving and blurring fiction and life, Beatlebone embodies beautifully this prize’s spirit of creative risk. We’re proud to crown it our winner."
—Josh Cohen, Chair of Judges, Goldsmiths Prize 2015
 
“Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven’t yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox—razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation.... And just when you think you’ve seen everything and that there’s nothing else the beast can unleash on his unsuspecting reader, he unveils a literary device this reader has never encountered before—a peek behind the curtain where the wizard wields the controls…. Well, you’ll have to read the book.
 
And it works. It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast. You see the trick of it? No fear.”
—Steve Earle, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Mr. Barry’s language is still poetic and reaching and imaginative, but now in effortless service to more substantial themes, in particular love and ‘the way that time moves.’ As the novel’s attention alternates between Mr. Barry’s real trip to the island and John’s made up one, the identities of the two men—both artists, both marked by the loss of their mothers—mingle, until their stories begin to overlap more and more exactly, and finally the two become indivisible, ghosts of each other across the decades. The effect is beautiful, reminiscent at different moments of Virginia Woolf and Geoff Dyer… Even as the journeys of the author and his protagonist merge, Mr. Barry and Lennon remain stubbornly distinct. But perhaps what ultimately makes this a great novel is its author’s exploration of the ways that sometimes, in art, we do get to become each other—kind of.”
—Charles Finch, The New York Times
 
“The story is intriguing, not least because it's rare to come upon a lesser-known narrative about the Beatles — and yet the unexpected turn of Barry's novel, which imagines a 1978 trip by Lennon to Dorinish, is that it isn't really about the singer at all…. Barry…is a genius of the language, teasing out impressionistic riffs that channel emotion into words.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“[E]xtraordinary… Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone is a strange, intense and slightly incoherent extended fantasy about two months that John Lennon spent in Ireland in 1978, fleeing an invasive press while searching for sanctuary on a remote island he had purchased on a whim. As unlikely as this premise seems, Barry is largely able to carry it off by force of imagination and by a super-charged prose style that borrows heavily from James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and other past masters of extravagant Irish lyricism at its high-modernist peak.
—Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post
 
Beatlebone is glorious, savory stuff—part lark, part meditation, and a tiny part excavation.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
 
“Barry has a wry, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and an equally affecting eye for character traits.”
—Liam Callanan, San Francisco Chronicle
 
Beatlebone, the novel, reads as brilliant liner notes for a nervous breakdown, a hip, alternative history for Lennon's lost years. We know John never made a sea-mammal inspired album. We are all too well aware that Mark David Chapman is waiting in the wings. We realize the ‘John Lennon’ in Barry's book is a confection, a creation, a sleight of hand. Yet somehow readers may feel they are getting close to the real flesh and blood human. There are places he remembered, and in his life, he loved them all. Perhaps an island in Clew Bay was one of them.”
—Jean Zimmerman, NPR.org
 
"There’s music to Barry’s prose: Smart rhythms dart through his sentences; taut bridges join his paragraphs; the tinge of hysteria serves to animate his characters and their surroundings. His dialogue is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, catching the idiom of the local life, and, in Beatlebone, nailing John Lennon, the wittiest and darkest Beatle, spot on."
—Fred Kaplan, Slate

"...[T]his glorious lark feels canonical."
—Boris Kachka, New York Magazine, "7 Books You Need to Read This November"

"Beatlebone is an odyssey of the mind. Its ever-shifting modes vividly recall James Joyce’s Ulysses.... The island simply represents an idea. What’s at stake in his getting to the island? We never really know, which is a tricky feat to pull off. Barry succeeds by parsing John’s limbo state so clearly and vividly."
—Josh Cook, Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Nearly every sentence exhibits the care and craft of a poet. Barry doesn’t waste a word.”
—Gregg LaGambina , The A.V. Club
 
It’s a musical fever dream of a book that sounds weirder than it is; Barry’s perfectly honed storytelling voice sweeps readers happily through decades and across rough seas.”
—Becky Ohlsen, BookPage
 
“Barry’s prose is at once dreamy and direct, ethereal and grounded.”
—Eric Swedlund, Paste Magazine.com

"Beatlebone is a perfect novel for someone who loves good fiction, or who wants to dive into the human condition, or any Beatles fan."
Anders Carlson, The Kansas City Star

"'The examined life turns out to be a pain in the stones,' Lennon says near the end of Beatlebone. But Barry’s keenly worded quest is worth the trip."
Heather Scott Partington, Las Vegas Weekly

"[Beatlebone is] a gloriously freewheeling tale imagining an attempt by John Lennon to visit the island he had bought off the coast of Mayo in 1967... Barry weaves his own odyssey to “Beatle Island” into a tale of fame, freaks, bad liquor and bad weather, with Lennon—angry, brilliant, sarcastic, tender, on a doomed quest for artistic release and his Irish roots—at its centre."
Justine Jordan, The Guardian

"Mingling surreal black humour and breakdown, Beatlebone is a wild cascade of language and imagery, rich in wordplay and referential resonance."
Lee Langley, The Spectator

"Casually lyrical, formally inventive, funny and moving, [Beatlebone] is a small wonder."
Theo Tait, Sunday Times

"Too often, novels about great artists shy away from attending to those very creative processes that made them great. Beatlebone is a committed, brutal portrait."
Tom Williams, Literary Review

"A famous musician's 1978 pilgrimage to an island off the west coast of Ireland takes several detours, abetted by his memories and his minder, in this original, lyrical, genre-challenging work... Nothing at all like Barry's award-winning debut novel, this may be a risky follow-up, but it's intriguing at every turn, and Barry's prose can be as mesmerizing as some of his hero's songs."
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Barry, a great poet of a novelist...has created an unusual novel, remarkable in structure as well as tone, that channels the contradictory nature of Lennon himself."
Booklist, starred review
 
[Reminds] us how writing merges memory and imagination to connect the living and the dead.”
Publishers Weekly

Author

© Olivia Smith
KEVIN BARRY is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland. View titles by Kevin Barry