Wild Houses by Colin Barrett review – a caper in County Mayo
On the back of his short-story collections, Young Skins and Homesickness, Colin Barrett was lauded by the Oprah Daily website as “a doyen of the sentence”. As accolades go, this has the dubious merit of being simultaneously embarrassing and accurate: a ludicrous phrase sullying a fair designation. Fair, because when reading Barrett, one is immediately struck by a sensation best described as relief: the realisation that one is in safe hands here; this is a writer of glaringly obvious talent, operating at a seriously high level. In Wild Houses we see for the first time Barrett’s evident abilities playing themselves out across the wider horizons of the novel form.
Readers familiar with Barrett’s work will immediately recognise the world of Wild Houses. Small-time County Mayo crooks Gabe and Sketch abduct Doll English, the younger brother of a local lad who owes them a few grand in drug debts. They all hole up for the weekend with Dev, a troubled and introverted soul whose remote farmhouse doubles as a convenient location to keep a hostage. From here we follow Doll’s girlfriend Nicky as she attempts to uncover what has happened and to bring Doll back home unharmed. In essence, the novel is a caper, the heaviness of the criminality undercut by bungles and incompetence. On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.
Barrett’s dialogue is so witty and inventive one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison
Wild Houses is a novel of rootedness, in every sense of the word. Characters are rooted to the spot, trapped and immobile; they are rooted in place, embedded and overfamiliar; they are rooted together, knotted and interconnected; and, in the final reckoning, they are rooted out, left uncovered and exposed. Barrett is superb in this space, capturing brilliantly the claustrophobia and repetitiveness of growing up in an area where everybody knows your name and has something to say about your business. The impact is accretive: the same people, the same conversations, the sense of lives lived on a loop, of needing to exert extraordinary will in order to achieve escape velocity. Barrett is a skilful enough writer that this is rendered without sentimentality; instead, we see the rhythms and recurrences of hard lives inscribed in the physicality of those forced to live them, a prematurely aged face “like a vandalised church”, eyes “glinting deep in their sockets like smashed out windows”. The novel is studded with such striking descriptions. While 99% of writers try to find new ways of describing the way light can blind you, Barrett tells us it was “blindingly dark”, a phrase at once so commonsense and so unusual that it caused me to double take.
Wild Houses is a book that critics and readers will inevitably end up praising on “a sentence level”. The fact that Barrett is so often hailed specifically for his mastery of the sentence is worth dwelling on. More often than not, when people commend a writer on these terms, they mean they have identified a particular type of sensibility at work. One thinks of James Baldwin’s goal “to write a sentence as clean as a bone”, George Orwell’s fetish for the “unadorned and invisible” or the tendency to praise prose for being “taut”, “lean”, “muscular” or “spare”. Leaving aside the ways this critical vocabulary might be rooted in our prejudices surrounding certain types of body – god forbid a sentence be “flabby” – one thing is clear: contemporary literary eulogies centre around control and restraint.
That may be reasonable enough, but its utter ubiquity can sometimes leave one longing for a counterweight; sentences that fail audaciously, a bit of bombast, a distrust of polite minimalism. And if Wild Houses has a flaw, then it is to be found here. With Barrett it is all precision and precious little release. His is the type of brilliance that can occasionally veer into the territory of the virtuosic, the relentless and the clinical. When working in the short-story form, this is an unalloyed asset, but across the course of a whole novel, it can begin to feel a little airless.
What ultimately prevents this from dragging the novel down is Barrett’s handling of dialogue, which is so consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison. When Doll’s mother complains in the car that “That’s how I know there’s a migraine in the post. The aura comes over me,” Doll replies, with “more unsolicited tuppencing from the back”, that there is “an awful mystical bent to mother’s suffering these days”. Exchanges like this – droll, linguistically inventive, poignant – are emblematic of Wild Houses, a novel which proves that, in the right hands, fine lines can fill a canvas as effectively as the boldest of brushstrokes.
• Wild Houses by Colin Barrett is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
