![]() While the drama of Night Boat is specific unto itself, driven by its own narrative inner workings of character, setting, and situation, it nonetheless speaks to issues involving Irish males (in particular) that resonate beyond its pages. Barry’s primary characters, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, have complex lives of their own, and in the foreign setting of a ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain, they are forced to confront not only the limitations of their elementary Spanish but also their inadequacy in articulating the emotional complexity of what has brought them to Algeciras: their search for Maurice’s daughter Dilly who has been missing for three years. ![]() Yet while nodding toward Godot, Night Boat is hardly derivative. Both the structure and the texture of Barry’s novel call to mind Vivian Mercier’s famous observation regarding Beckett’s play: “nothing happens, twice” ( 1956, 6). When Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier was published in 2019, both reviewers and readers recognized the situational correspondence between the novel’s central characters, a pair of spent Irish drug lords “in their low fifties” (2) inscribed in the act of conversationally unraveling and re-raveling their mostly deplorable lives, and Samuel Beckett’s brace of bowler-topped tramps in Waiting for Godot (1949). ![]()
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