While it will be obvious to any hard-core fan…that Barry knows as much about Lennon's life as most of his biographers, that's not what this book is about—it's far more ambitious. That's not to say that Beatlebone could have been written about just any rock star. Nor for that matter could it have been written by just any writer. Only a literary beast, a daredevil wholly convinced he was put on this planet to write, would ever or should ever attempt to cast a person as iconic as John Lennon as a character in a tale of his own invention. Kevin Barry…is that beast…Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven't yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox—razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist's approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation…And it works. It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast.

…strange and exhilarating…[The] first 200 pages are nearly perfect, observant, melancholy but not mournful, and tremendously funny…Mr. Barry's language is…poetic and reaching and imaginative…As the novel's attention alternates between Mr. Barry's real trip to the island and John's made up one, the identities of the two men…mingle, until their stories begin to overlap more and more exactly, and finally the two become indivisible, ghosts of each other across the decades. The effect is beautiful, reminiscent at different moments of Virginia Woolf and Geoff Dyer, especially the ambiguous narrator of Mr. Dyer's wonderful novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi…Perhaps what ultimately makes this a great novel is its author's exploration of the ways that sometimes, in art, we do get to become each other—kind of.

01/25/2016
Irish novelist Barry puts the striking brogue of his native accent to good use in the audio edition of his new book. The fictional story line, blending real-life events in pop music history with inventive fantasy and psychological introspection, centers on the late rock icon John Lennon’s 1978 visit to the remote island off the western coast of Ireland that he purchased a decade earlier. Barry shines in his vocal renderings of both Lennon and the other principal character, Cornelius O’Grady, a gruff no-nonsense driver for hire who possesses shape-shifting abilities that he displays while leading Lennon on a mystical journey. The secondary characters—an assorted cast of local burned-out hippies and salt-of-the-earth villagers—also shine in Barry’s vocal rendering, and Lennon even befriends a dog that he names after Beach Boy Brian Wilson. But the surreal plot elements are hard to follow in the audio edition, and the street-wise Lennon and his equally colorful companion certainly utter a great deal of harsh language. A Doubleday hardcover. (Nov.)

09/14/2015
In his second novel, Barry (City of Bohane) imagines John Lennon in the year 1978, deep in a funk and trying to visit Dorinish, aka Beatle Island—an island in Clew Bay, in the west of Ireland, that Lennon owned. But the press is on his tail, the weather is terrible, and all the islands look alike. Lennon and his Irish driver, Cornelius, lie low, go to a local bar (where Lennon is passed off as Cousin Kenneth from England), and, mostly, talk. Not much happens—there is rain, wind, and mist; Lennon has recurring thoughts of his parents and the Liverpool of his youth; there’s an acrid encounter with some ’60s holdouts. The talk, however, is beautiful: half prose, half song. It’s Irish and sentimental and sly and funny and obscene, covering suicidal cows, the pleasures of cough medicine, The Muppet Show, and the way certain places exert a palpable emotional pull. Two chapters are outliers: a funny/grim one set later on, with Lennon trying to make a record, and one covering Barry’s own time in Liverpool and Dorinish. This latter section, odd and lovely, seems like it could have been an author’s note, but it pays off, reminding us how writing merges memory and imagination to connect the living and the dead. Agent: Lucy Luck, Lucy Luck Associates. (Nov.)

A New York Times Notable Book • Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize

“Beatlebone is a novel that takes its reader to the edge—of the Western world, of sanity, of fame, of words. But it also takes us to the very edge of the novel form, where it meets its notorious doppelgänger, autobiography. Its compulsive narrative of one of the last century’s great musicians and pop icons gradually, and without a hint of contrivance, becomes a startling and original meditation on the uncanny relationship of a writer to his character. Intricately weaving and blurring fiction and life, Beatlebone embodies beautifully this prize’s spirit of creative risk. We’re proud to crown it our winner."
—Josh Cohen, Chair of Judges, Goldsmiths Prize 2015

“Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven’t yet been discouraged from taking real chances and blurring the lines between disciplines. Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox—razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation.... And just when you think you’ve seen everything and that there’s nothing else the beast can unleash on his unsuspecting reader, he unveils a literary device this reader has never encountered before—a peek behind the curtain where the wizard wields the controls…Well, you’ll have to read the book. And it works. It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast. You see the trick of it? No fear.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Barry’s language is still poetic and reaching and imaginative, but now in effortless service to more substantial themes, in particular love and ‘the way that time moves.’ As the novel’s attention alternates between Mr. Barry’s real trip to the island and John’s made up one, the identities of the two men—both artists, both marked by the loss of their mothers—mingle, until their stories begin to overlap more and more exactly, and finally the two become indivisible, ghosts of each other across the decades. The effect is beautiful, reminiscent at different moments of Virginia Woolf and Geoff Dyer… Even as the journeys of the author and his protagonist merge, Mr. Barry and Lennon remain stubbornly distinct. But perhaps what ultimately makes this a great novel is its author’s exploration of the ways that sometimes, in art, we do get to become each other—kind of.”
—The New York Times

“The story is intriguing, not least because it's rare to come upon a lesser-known narrative about the Beatles — and yet the unexpected turn of Barry's novel, which imagines a 1978 trip by Lennon to Dorinish, is that it isn't really about the singer at all…. Barry…is a genius of the language, teasing out impressionistic riffs that channel emotion into words.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[E]xtraordinary… Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone is a strange, intense and slightly incoherent extended fantasy about two months that John Lennon spent in Ireland in 1978, fleeing an invasive press while searching for sanctuary on a remote island he had purchased on a whim. As unlikely as this premise seems, Barry is largely able to carry it off by force of imagination and by a super-charged prose style that borrows heavily from James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and other past masters of extravagant Irish lyricism at its high-modernist peak.
—The Washington Post
 
“Beatlebone is glorious, savory stuff—part lark, part meditation, and a tiny part excavation.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“Barry has a wry, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and an equally affecting eye for character traits.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Beatlebone, the novel, reads as brilliant liner notes for a nervous breakdown, a hip, alternative history for Lennon's lost years. We know John never made a sea-mammal inspired album. We are all too well aware that Mark David Chapman is waiting in the wings. We realize the ‘John Lennon’ in Barry's book is a confection, a creation, a sleight of hand. Yet somehow readers may feel they are getting close to the real flesh and blood human. There are places he remembered, and in his life, he loved them all. Perhaps an island in Clew Bay was one of them.”
—NPR.org
 
"There’s music to Barry’s prose: Smart rhythms dart through his sentences; taut bridges join his paragraphs; the tinge of hysteria serves to animate his characters and their surroundings. His dialogue is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, catching the idiom of the local life, and, in Beatlebone, nailing John Lennon, the wittiest and darkest Beatle, spot on."
—Slate

"...[T]his glorious lark feels canonical."
—New York Magazine, "7 Books You Need to Read This November"

"Beatlebone is an odyssey of the mind. Its ever-shifting modes vividly recall James Joyce’s Ulysses.... The island simply represents an idea. What’s at stake in his getting to the island? We never really know, which is a tricky feat to pull off. Barry succeeds by parsing John’s limbo state so clearly and vividly."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Nearly every sentence exhibits the care and craft of a poet. Barry doesn’t waste a word.”
—The A.V. Club

“It’s a musical fever dream of a book that sounds weirder than it is; Barry’s perfectly honed storytelling voice sweeps readers happily through decades and across rough seas.”
—BookPage
 
“Barry’s prose is at once dreamy and direct, ethereal and grounded.”
—Paste Magazine.com

"Beatlebone is a perfect novel for someone who loves good fiction, or who wants to dive into the human condition, or any Beatles fan."
—The Kansas City Star

"'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."
—Las Vegas Weekly

"[Beatlebone is] a gloriously freewheeling tale imagining an attempt by John Lennon to visit the island he had bought off the coast of Mayo in 1967... Barry weaves his own odyssey to “Beatle Island” into a tale of fame, freaks, bad liquor and bad weather, with Lennon—angry, brilliant, sarcastic, tender, on a doomed quest for artistic release and his Irish roots—at its centre."
—The Guardian

"Mingling surreal black humour and breakdown, Beatlebone is a wild cascade of language and imagery, rich in wordplay and referential resonance."
—The Spectator

"Casually lyrical, formally inventive, funny and moving, [Beatlebone] is a small wonder."
—Sunday Times

"Too often, novels about great artists shy away from attending to those very creative processes that made them great. Beatlebone is a committed, brutal portrait."
—Literary Review

"A famous musician's 1978 pilgrimage to an island off the west coast of Ireland takes several detours, abetted by his memories and his minder, in this original, lyrical, genre-challenging work... Nothing at all like Barry's award-winning debut novel, this may be a risky follow-up, but it's intriguing at every turn, and Barry's prose can be as mesmerizing as some of his hero's songs."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Barry, a great poet of a novelist...has created an unusual novel, remarkable in structure as well as tone, that channels the contradictory nature of Lennon himself."
—Booklist, starred review

“[Reminds] us how writing merges memory and imagination to connect the living and the dead.”
—Publishers Weekly

11/15/2015
In May 1978, John Lennon attempts an escape to Dorinish, a remote island he owns off the coast of Mayo in western Ireland, where he hopes to spend three days rekindling his creativity. Pursued by paparazzi, Lennon entrusts his person and privacy to Cornelius O'Grady, who guarantees to deliver the mercurial genius to his isolated outpost without interference from the press and fans. Instead, O'Grady chaperones Lennon on an elliptical anabasis through the magical Mayo countryside. The artist eventually makes it to Dorinish, but only after spending one evening in a haunted rural pub and another at a commune of primal-scream therapy adherents. Along the way, Lennon resolves to record "beatlebone," a sonic and musical expression of his Irish odyssey. VERDICT The best moments in Barry's second novel (which follows the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning City of Bohane) happen when Lennon plays the straight man to the extraordinary O'Grady. An expository chapter describing Barry's own research journey for the book would have been a brilliant afterword but disrupts an otherwise extraordinary fiction that reads like a cross between Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea. [See Prepub Alert, 6/1/15.]—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

★ 2015-09-03
A famous musician's 1978 pilgrimage to an island off the west coast of Ireland takes several detours, abetted by his memories and his minder, in this original, lyrical, genre-challenging work. Barry set his remarkable first novel, City of Bohane (2011), some 40 years in the future. Here, he looks back almost 40 years as he imagines a 37-year-old John Lennon hoping he can cure a creative block with a few days alone on the tiny island he owns. When he arrives in western Ireland, he learns that reporters are in pursuit, and he struggles to dodge them with the help of his driver/facilitator, Cornelius, who stashes him at one point in the strange Amethyst Hotel. There, John, a veteran of primal scream therapy, encounters people who believe screaming and ranting at one another is good for the soul and psyche. In the course of this miniodyssey, John's mind wends through his past, growing up in Liverpool, a girlfriend named Julia, and his Irish antecedents. He has brilliant, funny, almost musical dialogue with Cornelius. Then, after 200 pages, the author/narrator breaks in and explains how he has tried "to spring a story" from some historical facts. He also retraces what might have been John's steps, including poking through the now-ruined Amethyst. A photograph of the hotel printed on one page suggests W.G. Sebald and the porous membrane between fiction and reality. The closing section features more delightful dialogue, now between John and his recording engineer, before the musician breaks into a Molly Bloom-esque monologue, complete with a lilting last line about "a sadness" in his mother's voice "that tells me the way that time moves and summer soon across the trees will spin its green strands." Nothing at all like Barry's award-winning debut novel, this may be a risky follow-up, but it's intriguing at every turn, and Barry's prose can be as mesmerizing as some of his hero's songs.