Old Music and the Language of Love and Death

I'm all for order and doing things in the proper way, but I have to tell about this book, That Old Country Music: Stories by Kevin Barry.  Yes, there are a string of books between this and the last book upon which I reported, but this book jumps to the head of the queue.  It's all about the dark spaces filled with nobodies who are living out singular lives on the edges of quiet desperation.  And that's exactly where I am right now.  

Kevin Barry, an Irish author, presents a set of short stories that read like full length books.  His generous word bank plunges into the coarse, wild landscape where lives are restless and impulsive and ruined.  Ruined as in laid bare, solitary and beautiful.  Interior landscapes that match the broken ruins of the Irish countryside, where hope is lost and futures mortgaged and past lives seek to drag you back into the wildness. 

Barry takes us with unflinching directness right to where it hurts.  He is the master of a turn of phrase with a brutal precision that get to the heart of things.  I think the poetry of his language is what affected me most.  "The thin film of skin between me and the world," like looking through gossamer and longing.  There were times when I hated what I was reading, the sadness of it, the smallness of those lives.  But even then, I recognized the truth.  Barry lifts the veil of cliche - the happy go lucky, ne-er do well Irish who are their own worst enemies - to see there is flesh and blood and pain and realization and making the best choice out of no choice at all.  It's all there laid out bare and stark and it rings truth.

Life is not ending in these stories, yet that would be the logical conclusion.  Instead each one is infused with realization and awareness of some change in circumstance, and each character finds the strength in that to carry on.  Because isn't that how life is?  At the moment when we want out, life carries on, dragging us along with it.  

One such story, Extremadura (Until Night Falls) is about a tramp who is in a strange country where he has no language.  His companion for the moment is an old dog who has, "Known harshness and cruelty ...who tells of a thin life and a harsh one in this cold-hearted, in this love-starved town."  This man has been walking for a long time and has lost his substance.  He has become invisible to all except the dog.  And then we discover why he is walking, walking away from a broken-heart and a love that occupies his mind despite the drink and the miles.  All the stories have the theme of love threading through but not the kind of love that is ends happily ever after.  

There is one story that speaks about an ancient old tale that still lives in a song sung by a senile old man.  The song, all 47 verses, is captured on a cellphone and transported to the modern age where it still has so much to say about the nature of love.  And there's the old woman and her son who sit at a bar regaling unwilling listeners with stories about Daddy, drinking their way through the bottles hung behind the bartender, like it were a wine tasting cocktail hour.  This story is as close as we come to comedy.

In another, possibly my favorite, a visiting poet ends up in the "bug house" after suffering a breakdown right there on an island at the edge of the world.  We don't know why the man is in the loony bin, but he is.  The doctor is after sleep for his patient.  The kind of sleep that numbs and might do some good.   He asks, "Did you come loose of yourself on Bofin, Ted?" 

But, the poet is after something else.  I don't quite know what.  He's walking at night in corridors littered with blood and bones and stinking flesh.  But there he finds great beauty, "In the neat piles cleaned smooth by the salt wind."  If you've ever known depression and come through it, you will know these words and what he's looking for.  And if you are a writer, you will know that going to work is about, "Crawling on your f----ing nerves."  Writing is about hiving off on your own and going into dark caves and sifting those white bones and hearing the howl and wail of the banshees and going deeper to find the, "Fire on the Moon" truth. I've never seen another sentence so clear, so stark, so simple in putting forth the writer's task as that line, "Crawling about on your own nerves to expose with ink and blood to all."   On the island, "His own words moved and came back to him and he could hear so clearly his lies and wheedling, he could hear his true and fervent love." This is why he cracked up.  This is why we all crack up eventually.   "Because broken heartedness is the note that sustains always and this he can play at will."  

Some say that this collection is not his best.  Some say that there are not enough anchor stories to hold the reader's interest.  Some say that the stories are all dark and dreary.  I say these readers have missed the point.  I think the trick is that That Old Country Music: Stories should be read in its entirety in one sitting because not one of those short stories is a stand alone.  They contain all the voices and characters that take part in the great story of ordinariness.  Each story is a pearl on the necklace that speaks to the human experience, with the thread of love in all its weird and mysterious manifestations that leave some so empty and bereft that they have to keep walking through the night to exorcise the last vestiges if it from the mind.