Kevin Barry's Beatlebone
Books & Poetry
Irish author Kevin Barry’s latest novel is a helter-skelter imagining of John Lennon’s search for solitude on a mysterious island.
You should never judge a book by its cover – and no, John Lennon did not say that. In the case of Kevin Barry’s much-lauded and highly-acclaimed fictional account of Lennon’s visit to his island off the west coast of Ireland, fiction is certainly stranger than truth.
The John in Barry’s book Beatlebone is at the end of his already gnawed tether and all he wants is to reach the island (Dorinish) and have three days of peace and quiet, the chance to rekindle his creativity and escape the cloying inertia of bread-making and bottle feeding.
Barry’s rendering of this paranoid and quixotic dash for solitude brings with it a picnic basket of known snippets and supposed mental hikes, love, love me doodled into a stream of dialogue between John and himself and John and his guide Cornelius, himself a man of many profound offerings, tribal customs and bizarre recipes.
When, as any mix of fact and fiction is prone to do, Beatlebone strays down the path of acid-house hotels manned solely by vegan swingers, Barry is quick to elaborate on how John handles these, which is usually with a caustic sideswipe on life and excess.
Leaving no rolling stone unturned, the author proceeds to enlighten as to the hows and whys of the book’s creation before resuming the tale sometime further along this helter-skelter row to the mysterious island.
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What we glean from all of this remains clouded in sea fog, until John is back in New York and being authentically transcribed over out-takes.
Beatlebone is neither a story nor reportage – it is somewhere in between, adrift on the mists of timelapse, a walrus of a tale woven around yesterdays and working-class heroes, drifting eventually to shore and home where the grand finale awaits.
As John Lennon once said to an uninvited intruder: “It’s just a bunch of words, man, and if they mean something to you then that’s your story, not mine.”
Beatlebone, by Kevin Barry, published by Canongate, $27.99.
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