![]() ![]() For starters he has trouble simply finding his island the local fixer taking care of him, a man named Cornelius who is incapable of fixing anything, doesn’t have a great idea of how to get there. These first 200 pages are nearly perfect, observant, melancholy but not mournful, and tremendously funny, largely because John’s endearingly lofty vision of his trip’s purpose, a communion with nature and himself, runs immediately into very practical problems. The poignant knowledge that this is an end-of-life crisis, not a middle-of-life one: That belongs to us, not to him. ![]() He’s nearing 40 here past drugs, past scream therapy, far past the Beatles, and stripped raw emotionally, tired “but not for sleeping,” full of “large sad warmish feelings.”Ī few days alone on his island, he hopes, will bring him the peace that even marriage and fatherhood, though he loves them, haven’t. It follows him closely for around 200 pages, through a few comically calamitous days in 1978, as he travels through western Ireland to an island off its coast, bought on a lark 11 years earlier. “Beatlebone,” the strange and exhilarating new novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is about John Lennon - kind of. ![]()
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