Wild Houses (2024)
By Colin Barrett
Grove Press, 272 pages.
★
By now you’ve probably heard that Samantha Harvey won this year’s Booker Prize for her superb novel Orbital. It was a good choice, though I might have given the nod to Percival Everett’s National Book Award-winning James. Wild Houses, the debut novel from Colin Barrett was longlisted for the Booker, but I’ll be hanged if I know why. It was praised for its beautiful sentences–by Oprah no less–and that too is baffling. It’s really just a caper novel and not a very interesting one.
Wild Houses takes place in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland, a real place of about 11,000 people. You might see the phrase “proleptic” used to describe Barrett’s novel. It’s a fancy way of saying that he writes as if his action is happening in real time, though it will actually occur in the future. That’s not as hard to do as Barrett’s story unfolds over a single weekend with occasional deeper background material from the past. Cillian English is adrift, but gets by as a small fry drug dealer until a stroke of very bad luck occurs. He is holding about £30,000 worth of coke that belongs to a big dealer named Mulrooney. Cillian buried it in a field with some of his own stash, but what the Irish call a turlough occurs—a seasonal flood that creates an instant lake. The coke dissolves. There is no such thing as an accident insofar as Mulrooney is concerned, so he sends the strong-armed, weak-brained brothers Gabe and Sketch Ferdia to get his cash back. Of course, Cillian can’t pay.
Cillian has a younger brother Donal, nicknamed “Doll,” a slight young man with a foul mouth, which seems to be the norm in Ballina. Doll English has pretty much raised himself, but not all that well. (His ‘da Martin has worked in the shale oil fields near Calgary, Canada, for the past 5 years and his salty-tongued mother Sheila is nobody’s idea of a role model.) Doll idolizes Cillian, but the best thing he has going for him is his (somewhat) more mature girlfriend Nicky, who was raised by her older brother. Nicky, in turn, looks out for Doll to the degree a 17-year-old can. As you have no doubt surmised, Barrett’s Ballina is an epicenter of rootless people rooted in place, if such a contradictory statement can be the case.
Doll will become a pawn in Cillian’s troubles and is kidnapped, another terms that’s fraught with ambiguity as he knows the Ferdia brothers and the further up-the-scale Dev Hendrick to whose home he is taken. Were not drugs and thugs involved and Doll’s health imperiled, the entire tale could be something out of a Buster Keaton comedy. (It also put me in mind of the satirical 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.)
Nicky and Sheila echo the Ferdia brothers in telling Cillian he has to pay for the mess into which he’s gotten Doll, but there’s no getting past the fact that Cillian doesn’t have £30,000. Will Gabe, Sketch, and Dev do in Doll? Will a magical solution occur? Ha! Ballina is miracle-impoverished. No matter how the issue resolves of fails to do so will certainly involve something underhanded. That is, if you stick around that long. I wouldn’t recommend that you do so. I have no idea why this novel was praised for its sentence structure unless someone really admires correct punctuation. There’s certainly nothing elegant about sentences that rely upon a string of curses followed by touches of florid filler. A reviewer in The Guardian complained that Wild Houses felt “airless” and “clinical.” I can but add, “To be sure, to be sure.”
Rob Weir
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