"He adored Cynthia the first time he saw her. When she turned the twist of a smile on him, he felt like he'd stepped off the earth."

Two Irish gangsters, well past their prime, wait for a ferry in the sleepy Spanish port of Algeciras. Maurice Hearne, the one with the missing eye, is hoping to find his daughter Dilly, whom he hasn't seen in over three years. The limping Charlie Redmond, his old pal and business associate, hands out flyers of the missing girl and pesters the poor attendant at the Información desk. The pair have seen better days but they still exude an air of menace. They reminisce about their glory days and mourn for lost love. We also learn how they got their injuries.

The story starts off as a kind of black comedy, the two men cracking jokes and telling stories about their early years, the dialogue singing in their bouncing Cork brogue. The tone often shifts however, into something dark and tragic. Flashbacks explain how they came to make their fortune, a drug-dealing venture providing more profit than they knew how to spend. The relentless danger and pressure took a toll on Maurice: "He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses - he was the gaunt accumulation of them." He felt his mind begin to unravel and believed that this illness was in his blood:
"He was from a line of madmen centuries deep. Who have all these years crawled beneath the skin of the night and trembled there. Who were found waking in the corners of wet Irish fields. Who were found crawling the rocks and in the seacaves. Found on hospital wards, and in bars, and in the depths of the woods."

Truthfully, Night Boat to Tangier is a love story. Cynthia, Dilly's mother, is the sun, moon and stars for Maurice, always has been. We deduce that she's not in the picture right now and read on to discover why. There were happy times, often drug-fuelled, and plenty of heartbreak, but they produced a beautiful daughter. Cynthia still fills his every waking thought, whether he likes it or not: "He will never lose the feeling of the love that they had together, or the nausea of its absence. Hate is not the answer to love; death is its answer." Eventually we get to hear from Cynthia herself, and we find out what the relationship meant to her:
"The sleeplessness and pain of the long absences, the hot lurches of emotion, the sudden reversals of fortune, the endless pleadings, the slow relentings, the golden times of morphiate heaven, the atrocities on both sides, the shock tactics, and the giddy joy of their lavish sexual reunions"

It's a story of lasting friendship and doomed romance. It's a tale of terrifying madness and reckless humour. Violence always seems to be on cusp of breaking out, but the tension is undercut with surprising tenderness and an unshakeable melancholy. It is written with the agility and conviction of a master storyteller. Night Boat to Tangier is another wild, lyrical dream from the unique imagination of Kevin Barry.

I really struggled with this book and for almost the first time I stopped reading it before I got to the end. I found the flow was extremely rambling, the dialogue did not appeal and what the story was about I did not discover. It is not my type of book.

An unprepossessing pair, Maurice and Charlie, a couple of hoodlums past their prime, but they grew on me as their story unfolded. Neither has much to be proud of in their past years - a mixture of drug taking, drug running and the kind of violence involved in that - both men bear the outward scars of old injuries. We come to learn of their inner scars too, their lost love for a woman and a daughter. The woman has died and the daughter has fled Ireland and buried herself in a hippy world in southern Spain and Morocco, which is why they are hanging out at the grungy ferry port in Algeciras. Will they meet and reconcile with her in this tawdry setting?

So much for the plot. My enjoyment of this story came not from the characters but from the atmosphere - of the ferry terminal, as soulless as only such places can be, of hot, sultry cities in Spain and of the far southwest coast of Ireland. Kevin Barry’s writing is inspired, such original turns of phrase on every page.

‘He arranged his face for Irish weather. This was not to be under-estimated. He scrunched his eyes against the wind. He twisted his mouth against the rain. Take these gestures and repeat them, times ten thousand for the life, and times the generations, and times the epochs and the eras, and see how the effect digs beneath the skin, enters the racial soul, prepares its affront to the world, and offers it - ……’

"At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018</b>

Would you say there’s any end in sight, Charlie?

I’d say you nearly have an answer to that question already, Maurice.

Two Irishmen sombre in the dank light of the terminal make gestures of long-sufferance and woe– they are born to such gestures, and offer them easily."

Kevin Barry's debut novel City of Bohane (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1425982809) won the Dublin Literary Prize and his second Beatlebone (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1429980411) the Goldsmiths Prize, so the advent of his third is potentially a major event.

Both of the two previous books impressed me in parts, but City of Bohane, although memorably atmospheric, didn't succeed for me as a story, and Beatlebone required rather more interest in John Lennon that I had, and I was unconvinced by the metafictional but rather artificial authorial intervention.

In that regard, although imperfect, Night Book to Tangier was more successful for me.

The novel opens, as per the opening quote, with two ageing Irish gangsters, in their early 50s according to the calendar but rather older based on life experiences, waiting in the dingy terminal at Algeciras in Spain, where ferries travel back and forth to Tangier.

One of Barry's strength is his visual descriptions and he beautifully conjours the pair:

"Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low fifties. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain– just about– a rakish air.

Maurice Hearne’s jaunty, crooked smile will appear with frequency. His left eye is smeared and dead, the other oddly bewitched, as though with an excess of life, for balance. He wears a shabby suit, an open-necked black shirt, white runners and a derby hat perched high on the back of his head. Dudeish, at one time, certainly, but past it now. You’ve him told, Maurice. You’ve manners put on the boy.

Charlie Redmond? The face somehow has an antique look, like a court player’s, medieval, a man who’d strum his lute for you. In some meadowsweet lair. Hot, adulterous eyes and again a shabby suit, but dapper shoes in a rusted-orange tone, a pair of suede-finish creepers that whisper of brothels, also a handsome green corduroy neck-tie. Also, stomach trouble, bags like graves beneath the eyes, and soul trouble."

The two are there looking for Maurice's daughter, Dilly, who they haven't seen for 3 years but believe to be in with a company of 'crusties', and they've received word she may be crossing to or from Tangier tonight, so they approach those in the terminal asking after her:

"She’s a small girl. She’s a pretty girl. She’d probably still have the dreadlocks. Dreadlocks, you know? Bob Marley? Jah Rastafari? She might have a dog or two with her, I’d say. Dog on a rope kind of thing? She’s a pretty girl. She’s twenty-three years of age by now. She’ll be dreadlock Rastafari.

You know what we’re going to need, Charlie?

What’s that, Moss?

We’re going to need the Spanish for crusty."

(they are later told by two such "crusties" that "the Spanish for crusty, she says, is perroflauta. It means a-dog-and-a-flute, Leonor says ... They say it as a curse, Leonor says. Because they don’t like us, Ana says. They say we’re dirty. They don’t want the camps. They don’t want no dogs. That’s why we go to Maroc.")

Much of the novel's pleasure comes from the bickering and bantering between the pair, still menacing as they demonstrate by terrifying the first crusty they spot. Indeed at times this part of the novel read more as a play than a novel, which is indeed how it began its life per an interview with Barry just after he won the Goldsmiths Prize.

"On the desk in his shed is a play called Night Boat to Tangier, a commission for Dublin’s ­Abbey Theatre, about an Irishman in Spain searching for his daughter, who has run off with “a band of crusties”. Barry is increasingly drawn to drama, which doesn’t rely on the tedious scaffolding of prose fiction. He shows me an A4 pad on which he has drawn stick men in an attempt to make the page his stage."
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/06/kevin-barry-s-chaotic-journey-stoner-entrepreneur-ireland-s-most-unpredictable

But the novel also takes us back in episodic flashbacks to their past and how they got here. Drug smuggling was their game, although that has dried up. "The money now was in the movement of people," we're told a couple of times - which links in rather nicely with the people smuggling in the MBI longlisted The Death of Murat Idrissi, in which the port of Algeciras and the Tangier ferry also plays a key role.

Their history takes us through the "seven distractions– love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death", and we learn of Maurice's turbulent relationship with his wife, caused by his lifestyle:

"The internecine strife of Maurice and Cynthia. More than twenty years she had given it. The sleeplessness and pain of the long absences, the hot lurches of emotion, the sudden reversals of fortune, the endless pleadings, the slow relentings, the golden times of morphiate heaven, the atrocities on both sides, the shock tactics, and the giddy joy of their lavish sexual reunions – it was all done with now."

and the rather unconventional childhood of their daughter Dilly:

"When she was a child, there would be callers at strange hours. Men in hats, and laughing women, and sometimes there were raised voices, and sometimes singing. All the lurchy moves and late-night exits – we’ve got to do the splits again, Dilly, will you pack what you need in your dinosaur bag?"

In the back story, Barry's gift for description comes to the fore - both the pithy one liner (a comment that a site chosen to build some new houses is rather exposed to the wind brings the retort "It’s the West of Ireland, he said. There’s a tendency to fucken wind.") as well as the more lyrical, for example this towards the novel's end:

"The peninsula ran its flank along the line of the coast road. The mountain absorbed the evening light and glowed morbidly. A roadside grotto showed the blue virgin. For the souls of the vehicular dead. By ten the moon was visible and drew her strangely. A vivid, late-summer moon. A xanthic was the word moon. She stopped the car and buzzed the window to hear the breath of sea; a strimmer vexed late in a high field; somewhere too the vixen screamed. On the ribs of the sea the last of the evening sun made bone-white marks. The hills for their part vibrated royally. It was close to night and oh-so-quiet again."

as well as Barry's signature from City of Bohane, the clothing description, here Charlie on his first trip to Spain to arrange a drug deal from Morocco:

"He wore a two-piece velour Gio-Goi tracksuit, a Kangol slouch hat and some kind of Brazilian– fucken Brazilian– trainers. The soles were made out of virgin rubber, Charlie had confided, with soft wonder in his voice. Charlie every month bought The Face and i-D magazines, spent hours on the fashion layouts, poring over them, with an expert’s keen and rueful air.

Are you trying to look like you’re involved in the fucken drug business? Maurice said. Drug business? Charlie said. I’m import– export. I’ve flown in for a trade show."

An atmospheric novel with a simple but ultimately powerful story as we come to understand why Tilly left home, and why the two men are there.

4 stars and recommended.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

October 2018. Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond, both Irish, sit waiting at the ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain. We soon learn that they are expecting to see Maurice’s daughter, Dilly, who has been absent for several years. Charles walks with a limp. Maurice has a bad eye.

The book proceeds in a mixture of talking at the ferry terminal and flashbacks that gradually answer our questions. We learn of Maurice and Charles’s history in drug smuggling and of some of its consequences. We learn of Dilly’s childhood. There is sex, there is sudden violence. Gradually we come to understand why they are in the ferry terminal and why they are waiting for Dilly.

But this book isn’t really about the story. It’s about the writing. I mean, who else can write ”The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.”

Yes, I wanted to know how things shaped up for Maurice and Charles. Yes, I wanted to know why Charles dragged one leg as he walked and why Maurice had a dodgy eye. But mostly, I just wanted to read more of Barry’s poetic prose. For a story that is essentially about the history two violent gangsters, this is delicate and tender.

There’s sex, there are drugs, there is violence. But don’t let that put you off: this is beautifully written and a pleasure to read.

I'm a huge fan of Kevin Barry's storytelling and this book hasn't disappointed. He tells stories on so many levels and with such musicality of language that the book is gripping from beginning to end.. The story is seemingly quite simple and set in a ferry terminal but, oh there is so much more than that. It's a gripping, entertaining piece of writing that often at times made me just stop and roll the sentences around in my head - such is Barry's skill. The intimacy and depth of feeling that he can convey with just the right words could make you cry. Just brilliant.

Night Boat to Tangier is an existential gangster novel, travelling between Ireland, Spain, and Morocco and musing on love and time. Charlie and Maurice, two Irish gangsters who've seen better days, are waiting in the Spanish port of Algeciras for the boat from Tangier. They're looking for a missing daughter, but what unfolds in between their waiting is the story of their past, of lost love and drugs and violence.

It is the tone and the carefully pitched conversations between Charlie and Maurice as they wait that really make this novel, taking it beyond the narrative of love and drug deals and betrayal into a kind of tragicomic realm where two characters play off each other brilliantly. Barry captures the sense of the history between them, but also the ridiculousness of these two men, and you could almost imagine the Algeciras scenes as a darkly comic play. In contrast, the flashback chapters that fleshed out their story and how they'd got to this point felt more standard gangster fare, solid but not quite touching the pace and tone of the conversations at the port.

This is a novel that proves that gangster stories can be told in exciting ways, using different writing styles and tones to really capture atmosphere. At times it felt like it was escaping the bounds of prose or the novel, with a sense of the dramatic and a film-like cutting between the present and the past, and this was a very welcome feature that brought the main characters to life.