Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry's second novel, Beatlebone – adding to the author's collection of awards with the Goldsmiths Prize this year – marks a continuation of his playful style and ingenuity in form.

Mixing monologue, dramatic form and a vaudevillian-like humour, Beatlebone fills the reader with wonder from its lyrical and fascinating insight into the John Lennon of 1978. Post-fatherhood and post primal scream therapy, John is now in Ireland searching for his island, Dornish (“You’d say it Durnish”). From the very outset we are confronted with a raw nature – the twisting winds and waves of Ireland and the crashing current of John and the various voices that populate his journey to the island.

Running throughout the spine of this novel is a sense of hidden depth, reinforced by the repetition of the line 'he had a shadow beneath his skin'. This depth is slowly brought to surface by the wild and coursing landscapes that colour the text, and the different memories and versions of John that it unearths along the way. With a beautiful attention to the senses throughout, it progresses in a film noir fashion, mixed with an almost Joycean assessment of detail that subtly weaves humour and mystery.

Beatlebone rewards its readers with an honest humour, an abundance of visual stimuli and a questioning of our own past through the internal and external journey of John.