A flawed but fascinating return by an Irish writer like few others
Night Boat to Tangier isn’t like anything else you’ve ever read. Summoning a haunted, off-kilter world of loneliness and regret, it lingers powerfully in the mind
Fiction: Night Boat to Tangier, By Kevin Barry, Canongate, €17.95
Kevin Barry is a gifted and original writer of a particularly Irish stripe. His work reminds you insistently of JM Synge: the torqued Hiberno-English, the lush romanticism, the comedy black as bogwater – not to mention the lonely characters with their chipped shoulders, their pessimistic wit and their lingering auras of postcolonial despair. Nobody outside Ireland, you find yourself thinking, could possibly quite ...
