Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry.
Doubleday, 255 pp., $25.95
In an afterword to the paperback edition of his first novel, City of Bohane (2011), Kevin Barry writes, âI work primarily from the ear⊠If you can get the speech, I believe, you can get the soul.â Heâs talking about a book in which he not only got the speech but invented a whole new language, the argot of the imagined metropolis of Bohane: a densely populated, catastrophically polluted, anarchic corner of the near future. Part Irish-inflected English, part rap lyric, part Clockwork Orange, part Hibernian bard, itâs how the street punks, mob bosses, alpha women, and warring gangs communicate in this dystopian western Ireland hellhole, in districts named Smoketown, the Back Trace, and Big Nothinâ, âa place ofâŠ
