Kevin Barry - The Heart in Winter

The town of Butte, Montana, USA, was built on mining. Its miners came from everywhere around the world, and their labour lined the pockets of the mine-owners to the extent of millions of dollars. Not for nothing was the town known as "the richest hill on Earth". The miners, of course, worked hard, long hours in dangerous conditions. Today the most sombre place for visitors to Butte is the memorial to the lives lost in the Speculator mine disaster of 1917. Another place to visit is one of the town's former brothels.

Both these aspects of Butte are part of the plot of Kevin Barry's novel The Heart in Winter. Set in the 1890s, one of its two central characters is Tom Rourke, an Irish immigrant who failed at being a miner, but now makes a living by selling dope, and casual work in the local photographer's shop. His nights are spent in Butte's bars and brothels. 

Polly Gillespie, on the other hand, is a mail order bride. She arrives at the station and within minutes is married to the zealous religious man Long Harrington, a manager at the Anaconda mining company. Her background is less clear, though its obvious she is not the shy virgin that Harrington thinks. Her marriage is immediately dark, as her new husband flagellates himself, presumeable for the sin he commits with Polly. On meeting Tom at the photographers, Polly is immediately taken. Soon they are fleeing through Montana's forested mountains, on the back of a stolen horse whose money bags are filled with the rent collected by Tom's former landlady. Rent that Tom rarely paid. Leaving the lodgings burning, and with little in the way of survival gear, Tom and Polly, escape into the woods and meet a succession of random, eccentric characters - precisely the types you might expect to be living in the woods in 1890s Montana. Religious, eccentric and brutalised. They are persued by three violent sexually obsessed thugs, hired by Harrington to return Polly and murder Tom. 

Their love affair is powerful and intense. It is brilliantly written, though the reader instinctively knows that it will not end well. Few lives seem to in Barry's portrayal of a Montana run through with profit hungry multinationals and with Native American genocide only a few years in the past.

Barry's writing is tight and clipped. This is not a long novel, though he packs a lot into each sentence. It is sparse, to the point of frustration at times. I found myself wanting a few longer descriptions of events. Reading this too fast means missing how events completely. But the pace fits the story of two lovers on the run, and its a fantastic portrayal of life on the edge of Western civilisation, in a place where as Sergio Leone put it in Few Dollars More, "Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price". 

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