The Montana, the elopement, a “city of whores and rotten lungs”. The new Kevin Barry

‘Movin’ to Montana soon,’ sang Frank Zappa, telling the tale of this eccentric Californian gentleman who, with his old nag, intended to move to the Big Sky State to become a dental floss magnate. Many have tried to find some hidden or even esoteric meaning in that track (could he be talking about drugs? Or perhaps he’s tearing the American dream to shreds? Or maybe it’s just a hippyish trip? A satire on counterculture?), but Zappa himself cleared up any misunderstandings: it was simply a humorous track veering into the absurd. In short, there was really no need to overthink it. One thing is certain, however: someone who decides to make a run for it from Montana – travelling in the opposite direction to the protagonist of Frank Zappa’s song, heading for San Francisco – is Thomas Rourke, an Irish opium addict (no need to add ‘drunkard’ – we’ve already said ‘Irish’) who is on the run with another man’s loot, horse and woman. The latter, however, lacks the decency to give up. Stubbornness, as we know, is a nasty beast. And Anthony Harrington, a hard-line disciplinarian with a managerial role at the local mine, simply refuses to let Polly Gillespie go. He’d married her off despite her being over thirty and, in a previous life, having been, well, a woman of the night. Harrington, however, was unaware of her past, having ordered her by post and accepting her claim of virginity, complete with a pair of pig’s blood sausages intended to burst at the moment of consummation. The relationship between Polly and Thomas, on the other hand, is a great love story and, as is customary, sees them travelling miles and overcoming obstacles. He photographs her in the studio where he occasionally remembers to work, and from then on the two can’t bear to be apart. Much to Harrington’s despair, he’ll set a pack of hardened bounty hunters on their trail during this little escapade of theirs, well past the deadline.

A quintessential Western, as one might expect. We are, after all, in Butte, in 1891, yet "The Heart of Winter" (Fazi) – the eagerly awaited new book by Kevin Barry, perhaps the most interesting writer to emerge from the Emerald Isle in the last twenty-five years – remains, at heart, a novel by an Irishman. And so the epic tale of the rush to the West – or even simply the flight from the law – is inextricably intertwined with the Gaelic diaspora. Butte, ‘a town of whores and rotten lungs’, was once ‘the richest hill in the world’, and it is partly thanks to the staggering quantities of copper, silver, gold and zinc mined there that the United States became electrified and industrialised. Today, a ‘world-class’ museum commemorates this mining past (the Americans can never seem to be satisfied with the national level; for them, it’s always the World Series). If you look for news about this sleepy province, all you’ll find are air-quality reports (we’d expected worse) and a video from a couple of years ago showing an elephant that had escaped from the circus wandering down the high street. As there wasn’t much to buy, after twenty minutes Viola – that was the pachyderm’s name – decided to head back to work.

At the time in which Kevin Barry’s story is set, there were around ten thousand Irish people, and even today a quarter of the inhabitants claim to be of Irish descent. “Terrible people, born in a terrible country”, in the words of the sheriff in the novel. Today, even the mayor (who here is the chief executive…) J.P. Gallagher, a former footballer and coach, makes no secret of his Irish heritage. If we then look at the electoral history of this small town, in a state that has historically been ‘red’ (in the Republican sense), the vote here has always gone to the Democrats (perhaps due to the blue-collar majority). Elsewhere, Americans of Irish descent have drifted towards pro-Trump positions, but not in Butte, where Kamala Harris won again in 2024, albeit with a narrower margin than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Could the comeback for the mid-term elections begin in this remote little town? Unlikely. In the meantime, Kevin Barry has written a book about it, which took twenty years to complete, involving on-site visits and research. “I’ve now developed an alchemical connection with that place,” he says in an interview with LitHub. We will not reveal whether Thomas Rourke and his beautiful Polly Gillespie will ever make it to San Francisco, but, as with Frank Zappa, we suspect that Kevin Barry might have considered moving to Montana himself. As long as he doesn’t stop writing and leaves the dental floss business to others.