Beatlebone By Kevin Barry, $25.
“He sets out … as though on some fated migration. There is nothing rational about it nor even entirely sane ...” Thus begins (a fictionalized) John Lennon’s journey in Kevin Barry’s novel Beatlebone. Barry imagines Lennon visiting the west coast of Ireland in 1978, nine years after he has purchased the remote island of Dorinish. Lennon wants to visit his island—little more than rock and soil—so he can be alone and scream. He’s feeling himself unravel, and the island becomes a magical obsession in this existential quest tale.
Lennon is joined by his guide, Cornelius, who acts as both foil and driving force to keep Lennon moving. Cornelius realizes the futility of their journey, yet he’s happy to join Lennon, and provides some levity to balance the singer’s dark moments. “It’s been nine f*cking years … How the hell are we going to find my island, Cornelius?” Lennon asks. His guide replies: “With enormous difficulty, John.” Beatlebone finds its groove in these back-and-forth conversations, an attempt to fill the time while the two men try to reach enlightenment that is, perhaps, unreachable. Lennon wants to right himself, to tap into feelings mystically linked to the island. But first, he has to remember where he left it.
As a quest story, Beatlebone works; the striking contrast between Cornelius and John makes their conversations interesting even when mundane. The two are waylaid by myriad complications. Barry captures the ethereal (sometimes nonsensical) shifts in Lennon’s sentence structure, and eventually the author inserts himself (or a character portraying the author, in first person) into the narrative. He tells his readers how he inhabited the voice and the world of Lennon: He is quite nasal and often defensive. There is a haughtiness that can be almost princely, but his moods are capricious—sometimes he’s charming and funny and light; other times darkness is evident, and impatience that can bleed almost into bitterness.
Though the backstory is interesting, Barry loses the momentum he’s built with the journey at the point where he inserts his own character. In terms of shifting genres, tone and structure, Barry’s skilled hand as a writer shows. But once he intervenes, the story isn’t the same. He visits the places that Lennon surely traveled, telling his reader, “What I mean to say is that I wanted to scream.” From then on, the story loses a bit of its power. Barry’s Lennon is a little more himself, a little less the reader’s.
“The examined life turns out to be a pain in the stones,” Lennon says near the end of Beatlebone. But Barry’s keenly worded quest is worth the trip.
