Night Boat To Tangier

Two Irishmen, fiftyish, wait in the ferry terminal in a Spanish port. They are Maurice and Charlie, and have a long and troublesome friendship, as well as a history of drug smuggling. They are waiting for Maurice's daughter, Dilly, whom Maurice hasn't seen in three years. But they aren't sure if she is coming to get a boat, or getting off of one.

Such is the Beckettian setting of Kevin Barry's Night Boat To Tangier. I've read another Barry book, Beatlebone, and they share some characteristics. He can be spare with words--this is a very short book--but also paint beautiful pictures. But the point here seems to be that these two men have wasted their lives, and continue wasting it, as when Dilly does show up they don't even recognize her.

Though they may be wasting their time, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot, Barry manages to pack in a great deal of humanity into the two men. The port in Spain is the frame for a series of flashbacks, back to when the two men started in the drug business, when Maurice married and fathered Dilly, and then Charlie betrayed him. They then end up in the same mental institution, a bit of a stretch of coincidence, but a good one. There is one chapter simply devoted to when Maurice and Charlie meet after the betrayal, but is told from the point of view of the barman and a patron. It ends with this spectacular paragraph:

"Of the dozen or so unreliable narrators left in the room at this small hour, all would claim to have seen precisely what happened next—except for Nelson, who considered himself fortunate to be on the other side of the bar—and, in fact, Jimmy Earls would claim even to have heard what happened next, heard precisely the sound that was made when Maurice Hearne in a single movement took the knife from his pocket, dropped to a kneeling position and plunged the knife into the cup of Charlie Redmond’s right knee, but it was the withdrawal of the knife that did the damage, for it was in this motion that he sliced the ligament, and it was this ripping sound that Jimmy Earls vowed he would carry with him to the deadhouse walls, and with it the single dull gasp that Charlie made."

The two men are also philosophers of a sort, sharing aphorisms as they wait. "We come into the world on the tip of a scream and the wave of our poor mothers’ roaring." "Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields." "The fear of turning into our parents, she said, is what turns us into our fucking parents."

Maurice and Charlie make good company, but again I have read a book that does not contain quotation marks around dialogue. I don't get this. But aside from occasionally mistaking narrative for dialogue, or vice versa, it doesn't take away from my enjoyment.

Night Boat To Tangier is a decent book, but aside from a few stirring moments, doesn't transcend into greatness.