Kevin Barry’s novels tend to be about men who drink, drug, fight, and fuck too much. They are dramatic and violent, comic and musical. But they are never the same. It is the music that sets them apart, as if Barry has reinvented his language and style for each new tale.

In his latest, The Heart in Winter, he serves us Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, ne’er-do-well lovers in the Montana of 1891. Tom is a songwriter who makes something of a living by writing love letters for other men. Polly is a woman of mixed repute escaping rather vague troubles back in New England. The attraction is immediate, and theirs would be a perfect (if somewhat disheveled) love but for the fact that Polly is the newly arrived, utterly inappropriate mail-order bride of Long Anthony Harrington — a captain at the local mine and a citizen of much greater consequence than Tom Rourke if only because everyone in Butte is of much greater consequence than Tom Rourke.

So the two lovers run away; Tom’s plan is to get to San Francisco, having robbed Madam Horvat’s boardinghouse to finance the trip. Of course, there’s also no place else to go, so when Long Anthony hires the fierce Jago Marrak and his gang of Cornish gunmen to bring them back, they know where to look.

The tale of slightly guilty innocents being chased through the rugged West by vengeful hired gunmen isn’t exactly new, and neither is the blunt and graphic violence that Tom and Polly are never more than a few steps ahead of. But The Heart in Winter is made individual by its raucous sexuality and by the sheer delight to be had in the characters’ sloppy attempts to topple fate. Imagine if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.

We’re treated to rough, hungry lovemaking and explicit, compulsive violence, but we also watch a couple who can literally communicate without words — sitting by a mountain stream or lying in bed having whole conversations without speaking. Tom and Polly recognize each other as soulmates even though neither is sure they have a soul.

Unfortunately, the beauty of their love is matched by their incompetence both as criminals and as backwoods travelers, as well as by their colossal disregard for their own safety. The result is that, as the novel goes on, our desire for them to survive and make it to the city where they can survive is mixed with our certainty that they’ll get caught. No matter. I followed. For readers, much like for Tom and Polly, it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts.

The music of Barry’s language is the engine of that journey, so readers’ reaction to the book will depend on their reaction to the prose. Perhaps Barry is on shakier ground here than with his masterpiece, Night Boat to Tangier. He has a powerful gift for metaphor and description, and I marked dozens of phrases that I wish I’d written myself. But for some readers, beautiful phrasing isn’t the proper goal of what is ultimately an adventure novel.

Barry can find original, arresting language to describe anything — occasionally, too many things. Tom does not have a headache but a “trepanation-like skull pain” (I had to look it up, too). Whenever he thinks, “worms of concentration wriggle” his brow. He and Polly sleep “ravenously” and eat “alleged” pork, and their lovemaking is like “conducting a tupenny orchestra” as the wind in the trees softly applauds.

All of this is absolutely fitting as they attempt to escape Harrington, who “hated especially the eloquent,” and stumble toward “the great dark oily pool of silence” that awaits them. We only get that silence on the last page. As the tragedy concludes, the music grows quieter but is sustained like the long last note in that Beatles song Barry has also written about.

John P. Loonam has a Ph.D. in American literature from the City University of New York and taught English in New York City public schools for over 35 years. He has published fiction in various journals and anthologies, and his short plays have been featured by the Mottola Theater Project several times. He is married and the father of two sons; the four have lived in Brooklyn since before it was cool. His first novel, Music the World Makes, will be published by Frayed Edge Press in 2025, while a collection of his short stories, The Price of Their Toys, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press.

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