Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie meet in a photography studio in Butte, Mt during its early mining boom at the end of the 19th century, a raucous town filled with bars and other distractions. Tom’s are drink, dope, and writing letters for the lovelorn. A lank, loquacious Irishman, he is smitten by Polly as she poses for her wedding photos with Anthony Harrington, a self-flagellating mine captain who had requisitioned Polly from Chicago. A dreamer with wanderlust, she realizes her mistake, and escapes with Tom through the mountains of western Montana, aiming for the San Francisco Bay. Their picaresque journey begins with several benign encounters with other furtive travelers, but soon devolves when the Captain begins a search for his missing bride.
Barry’s Irish sensibility shimmers on every page. His language is at times baroque, at timers gutteral, but always apposite to the situation. It took me a few pages to become accustomed to the lilt, to the sometimes fractured phrasing, but that quickly faded as the style became the characters, their thoughts, their actions. An example, as Polly reflects on her life: “she tries not to fall into the drag of the past like the drag of a river because it is so powerful it can take you down. Anyhow the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.”
Barry does make sense of these lovers’ lives, the time and places they came from and lived in. At 245 pages, a very quick read despite the unique prose.