It is 1978, and John, a world-famous musician in a fallow period, is making for a tiny island off the west of Ireland, trying to stay one step ahead of a childhood that haunts him and the pressmen that hound him wherever he turns.
Taken under the wing of Cornelius O’Grady, a local man with a van and a predilection for the magical, he begins a quixotic journey through the misfits that inhabit this forgotten, windswept coast.
Barry’s language is mesmerising, luxuriant and vivid, but he is a little too aware of it, and at times that lyricism hampers the novel’s progression and development.
There are passages that astound, and the whole book is shot through with humour and melancholy. But the tangle of ideas, and its obsession with style, means that ultimately it doesn’t quite cohere, or go as deep as it could have.
