I've always been fascinated to me how different things in life connect in odd ways. I recently wrote about the film Yesterday which imagines a world where The Beatles never existed, and at the same time, I started reading this book which imagines a journey John Lennon would take in 1978 and a resulting album that he would make from it. Out of nowhere, I was engulfed in historical Beatle fiction, and it was a nice place to live for a bit.
(Doubleday, 2015)
It's 1978 and John Lennon is on a quest to find a small uninhabited island in Clew Bay that he'd purchased a decade before with the intention of making it a paradise of isolation. Having abandoned those dreams years before, now he's simply looking for a place to be alone for a few days so he can scream until he empties his soul and can start anew.
As with all things in life, John's plan doesn't turn out according to plan. The existential experience he was search for on the island turns into an existential journey to get there. Hiding from the press, getting lost in the confusing maze of islands, he ends up traveling through the stages of his life, and fighting off the stages of insanity, to come through clean on the other side.
The star of this story is the language and the writing. Kevin Barry's style is reminiscent of other writers that I've admired in the past. He breaks convention, finds lyricism and rhythm in the words, and engulfs the reader in a beautifully fragile world that feels like a thin bubble that could burst at anytime.
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