Customer Reviews

The Engine of Owl-Light

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A colleague of mine is writing a novel with three distinct narrative voices. This is difficult enough; Barry's first novel, from 1987, published when he was only 33, takes on six. The result is exactly what you'd expect of an Irish author in debt to Joyce, Beckett, and all the other poetic and prose voices in the head of any new writer entering into the competition to join such earlier champions. It also may explain why, detouring into the creation of well-received plays such as "The Steward of Christendom," Barry subsequently waited a decade and more before his considerably more accomplished and disciplined second novel, "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty," appeared.

The problem with "Engine" is that it's not worth the trouble to get through. Barry's full of intriguing ideas and parts of the multi-layered narrative work in fits and starts, but the momentum fails to be gained, as each of the six voices sputters on a few pages before being supplanted by another, and so on for over 350 closely printed pages. The plots, also, are not engaging enough to sustain interest. Calling the key figure Moran, and expending great effort in writing Oxen-of-the-Sun types of half-antiquated, half-Joycean narrative interspersed with more than passing nods to Beckett makes Barry look all the smaller in the shadows of such giants. While Barry's ambition is to be duly noted, the novel that emerges, half-digested, is far from a satisfying repast for any reader who has enjoyed Barry's influences and inspirations. It's a novel overstuffed and undercooked.

Try "Whereabouts," his recent Booker Prize finalist "A Long Long Way"--both reviewed by me on Amazon--or his shorter "Annie Dunne" for better examples of what the mature Barry can produce as nourishing, substantial fiction.