Guy Stagg

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Wild Houses, Colin Barrett, Jonathan Cape, Hardback, pp. 272
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Teenagers ought to be good subjects for literature. They embarrass easily, make regular mistakes, and reinvent themselves in the desire to become more popular. They are trying sex, drink and drugs for the first time, and navigating the chaos that follows. They have yet to learn most of the major life lessons, and they’re often stuck in the suburbs or a provincial town, half-hopeful and half-afraid of the future.

All the same, writing about teenagers is a risky business. What’s more, the boredom and self-interest are essential parts of adolescence, which means a novelist must give them plenty of space, or else the characters turn into premature adults, like those glossy teen dramas filled with actors in their twenties, no acne or awkwardness in sight.

Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses is a novel about three characters on the edge of adulthood. To begin with we meet Dev Hendrick, who has a giant body but a passive character. Since the death of his mother, he has been living in the countryside with only a Pomeranian Jack Russell for company. Next comes Nicky Hennigan, an orphan from nearby Ballina, a fictional town somewhere in County Mayo, working at a pub and waiting to escape to university. However, she feels conflicted about leaving behind her boyfriend, Doll English, a feckless young man whose charismatic brother, Cillian, is the local drug dealer. Then, after a house party one summer evening, Doll disappears.

Events in the novel are being driven by adults: another pair of brothers called Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, who befriend Dev to take advantage of his remote house, and Cillian English, who owes the brothers thousands of euros after losing all their drugs. However, the focus remains fixed on the younger characters, who find themselves caught up in this feud against their will. Which is fitting, given that one of adulthood’s more unwelcome lessons is all the responsibilities we must accept without having asked for them.

Colin Barrett has written about some of these subjects before. His first story collection, Young Skins, included teenage characters scattered round a small town in West Ireland (‘A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits.’) One of those stories, a novella called ‘Calm with Horses’ that later became a film, also featured criminals and drug dealers confronting family loyalties. Though not the strongest story in the collection, it pointed towards Barrett’s novel: blending a taste for rural absurdity borrowed from Kevin Barry with the brutish violence found in certain corners of American fiction.

In fact, Barrett’s most obvious debt was to the American author Denis Johnson. The glittering language used to describe grubby lives, the earthy humour and sudden outbursts of insanity – all this recalled Johnson’s celebrated collection Jesus’ Son. There the subject was junkies, rather than adolescents, but the genius of that book was in capturing the bewilderment of an addict’s life without straying into incoherence: the tone at once precise and chatty, the technique at once sprawling and tight.

Several of Barrett’s stories have employed Johnson’s meandering narrative style and startling swerves of direction. In ‘The Clancy Kid’, from that first collection, two friends pinballed between obsessing over a lost schoolboy, flipping a car on its head, and then playfighting with a gang of children. In ‘The Alps’, from his second collection, Homesickness, three brothers encountered a young man showing off a Japanese samurai sword at a football clubhouse. In both cases, the shortness of the form was an advantage, with unexcepted incidents and unexplained digressions confined to twenty or thirty pages. As a result, Barrett’s stories could capture the random inevitability of everyday life, without becoming confused.

In Wild Houses, Barrett has adapted this style to suit the structural demands of a novel. He’s strict about building tension, alternating perspectives and filling in characters’ back stories to provide emotional engagement. It’s less daring than the shorter stuff, because the plot has to be carefully controlled to ensure the various strands gather into a satisfying climax. At times I missed some of the hectic energy found in the stories, but the novel’s best moments came when Barrett recreated that intensity. For instance, two thirds of the way through the book, the Ferdia brothers come close to killing Doll English. The writing pulses with a sense of exhilaration, as if even the author cannot guess what might happen next:
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Water crashed in every direction, flurried spatters hitting the walls and slices of water flopping heavily out over the lip of the tub, drenching the already drenched floor. Doll’s head was completely under the water […] Dev watched Doll’s legs scrambling, the soles of his runners squeaking frenetically for purchase on the shining tiles.
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As this passage shows, Barrett’s prose is bright with vivid imagery and bristling with tactile details. From the opening pages, the language soars without seeming to strain, the metaphors and similes all perfectly judged. There’s ‘the bubble-wrap crackle of wheels turning slow on gravel’ and hair ‘so sodden with rain and product it gleamed like melted tar’. One character has ‘tattooed arms so lavishly lettered and illustrated they looked like the pages of medieval manuscript’, while another character has ‘tints the pale blue of cue-chalk [that] scooped the lower orbits of his eyes’. What’s more, Barrett is not afraid to pile up resonant language, or layer sensory impressions over one another, like the ‘centipede of shackled trolleys rattling lonesomely on their wheels in the breeze’.

Perhaps the most impressive writing can be found in the dialogue. The author has a remarkable ear for speech that sounds both natural and vital. His garrulous gangsters blend slang, swear words and comic anecdotes, as when Gabe Ferdia describes his aunt:
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“We’d this aunt. Sketch, remember Kitty? She was one of them ones who manage to always be a bit unwell, always suffering in some way, but she’d never take a painkiller. Which would have been her own business only she wasn’t a bit stoic. She’d never stop going on about her aches and pains, how her head was at her and the stomach was at her and the back and the feet were at her. One time I said to her, I said, Why don’t you just take something if you’re in so much pain, Kitty? And she looked at me and she said, Oh no, Gabriel, I couldn’t do that, and I said, Why? and she said, Because then I’d be afraid I wouldn’t be able to tell if the pain was getting worse. Such a woman!”
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Novelists from Dickens onwards have been fond of loquacious lowlifes. There’s a tendency to indulge their mannerisms and habits of speech, until the criminals resemble caricatures. Barrett avoids this trap by giving us glimpses of the psychology behind so much macho posturing: ‘The Ferdias had the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand. You could never tell what lines they would elect to cross, what courses of action they would follow through to the bitter end, because they did not know either.’

At the same time, Barrett’s gangsters are mostly amateurs and their crimes more like cartoon capers. This makes sense, because unlike the gangsters of film and television, these crimes are taking place in the countryside. Characters know one another’s parents, or crossed paths at school, or spent a summer working in the same pub together. Whatever course their life might have taken since, the only way to escape the gossiping gaze of the locals is to leave and never return. The city makes possible the dream of anonymity, but in the countryside everyone knows your business, even when that business is dealing drugs.

Wild Houses makes the most of this suffocating closeness. The western edge of Ireland is described with pitiless exactitude, mixing blandness, tackiness and moments of snatched beauty. There is nothing romantic about this version of rural life, and few of the characters have the time for bucolic dreaminess. When Dev stands alone among the fields he has known his whole life, or when Nicky wanders into the woods just beyond the borders of a party, we have a sense of the emptiness and boredom surrounding these lives. This is a landscape that refuses to comfort or distract, as Nicky realises after her boyfriend goes missing. ‘The countryside was huge and quiet and empty… Doll was lost and she needed to find him, but the countryside wasn’t giving her anything; the countryside was holding its tongue and steadfastly averting its gaze as she travelled towards the unending low horizon and the indistinct serrations of the distant mountain ranges, the wide-open fields flipping by like the row of blank pages at the end of a book after the story was over.’

It’s interesting to read about the Irish landscape as something other than the source of sentimental yearning, or the background for the hardships of historical fiction. Instead, we have the familiar frustrations of modern-day life, in particular the frustration of living in a place that offers no economic future. Those who suffer most are young men without the education or initiative to leave their homes behind; instead they retreat into video games and the internet, or else turn towards drugs and crime. Geography, family, money – these become the cages that keep Barrett’s characters trapped. It’s no coincidence that the plot turns on a pair of brothers, an unpayable debt, and a unique topographical feature of the region.

Barrett belongs to a new generation of Irish authors who have been praised for their energy and originality. Several critics have asked what characteristics these authors share, and even conjured theories to explain the current crop of talent – involving the recession, the number and quality of small magazines, and the complicated inheritance of Irish literature, religion, and the diaspora. More difficult is finding a thread that connects their various styles: despite the superficial similarity of subject matter, the pared-back prose of Sally Rooney – whose adolescent characters talk, work and travel like the young people in any prosperous European country – has little in common with the obsessive specificity of Barrett’s style, built from the tiny tells of location and speech.

That said, Wild Houses offers a partial answer to this question. In one of the novel’s characteristic details, Barrett describes a shrivelled football attached to the hedge outside the English family’s house, left behind from some childhood game. The family members are so used to the football that they no longer notice its presence, let alone make the effort to throw it away. This football could stand in for Barrett’s entire approach: noticing the drab minutiae of provincial lives, details so familiar they are overlooked by the rest of us. This is more than his skill at describing things; rather, it’s his belief that such places and people are worth writing about. That the small towns and stunted experiences of modern-day Ireland can be as fascinating as the educated, cultured and international casts that populate many contemporary novels – provided someone pays them enough attention. Seen from the other side of the Irish Sea, this looks like a courageous act, and one to wish for more often in English fiction.
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Guy Stagg grew up in Paris, Heidelberg, Yorkshire and London. The Crossway is his first book and is an account of his ten-month walk to Jerusalem. It was shortlisted for the inaugural DRF Award in 2016; and since then has won the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019, as well as being shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 and the Somerset Maugham Award 2019. The Crossway was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.