The years are rolling out like tide now.
His aura is of brassy menace.
I fucken hate ignorance, he says.
From the glare of the arclights, the lingering of pollutants and the refraction of heat left by the late October sun, the air is thick and smoky, and it makes the night glow a vivid thing, and dense.
An attack dog barks a yard of stars.
They exchange a dry look.
The bar awaits grimly beneath the glare of its strip lights. It runs the thread of its voices.
The head waiter looked like a ’tacheless Salvador Dali and drank a ball of coñac and was sustained.
The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.
The hours were heavy and cumbersome and moved by like old horses.
The barman drooped a heavy eye over the football pages. He had the look of a long shift off him.
A dead hotel was chained up, its windows blind.
That’s enough to give you a taste. Oh yes, and this beauty:
He drank Powers whiskey from a naggin clamped between his thighs and slowed for the bends that he knew by touch.
What’s it about? Drugs, sex, violence. Need I say more? Just finished chapter eight, “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club.” What an extraordinary piece of writing! Haven’t read anything like it since the knife fight in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. Barry’s style crosses McCarthy on Tarantino. Beware! Fucken addictive.
Postscript: The New Yorker recently ran a terrific Kevin Barry short story – “The Pub with No Beer.” That’s where I first encountered him.
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