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Photo: Courtesy of Colin Barrett
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Colin Barrett Mines Small-Town Life in His Raucous First Novel
The Canadian-born Irish short-story writer dazzles in 'Wild Houses,' a witty crime caper about a wild family from the town of Ballina / BY Gillian Graham / February 29th, 2024
It’s a quirk of biography that Colin Barrett, 41, a member of the Irish literary pantheon that includes Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney, Colm Toíbin and luminaries too numerous to mention, was born in Canada. His early years were spent in Fort McMurray, Alta. – where his father, an electrician, worked in the oil sands – and in Toronto. When Colin was three, his Irish-born parents moved the family back to County Mayo in northwestern Ireland, and it was there that his imagination took root.
“Everything’s wrapped up in Mayo. It’s a sort of primordial imaginative space for me,” says Barrett, speaking over Zoom from his childhood home in Knockmore, County Mayo, where his mother still lives and he and his two children, four and seven, are visiting from Dublin. A soft-spoken, courteous man with a wry manner, Barrett acknowledges that the early dramatic shift to rural Ireland from a Toronto high-rise apartment helped shape him as a writer. As a boy, he says, he felt “a bit of a disconnect” from his peers, and he paid close attention to the local idioms, attitudes and temperaments that later informed his fiction.
Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, a witty, dark-hued crime caper (out March 12), takes place in the town of Ballina on the River Moy. His two acclaimed collections of short stories, Young Skins, 2014, and Homesickness, 2022, are similarly situated in County Mayo. Praise for Wild Houses, which came out in January in Ireland and the United Kingdom, has been lavish. “This is a writer of glaringly obvious talent, operating at a seriously high level,” wrote Kieran Goddard in The Guardian newspaper.
Wild Houses is told from the dual perspectives of two markedly different characters: Nicky Hennigan is a 17-year-old student who occasionally allows herself to dream of attending college in Dublin. (Having lost both parents, she has created a kind of surrogate family with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Doll English, and his mother.) Dev Hendrick is a withdrawn, psychologically fragile young man who since the death of his mother lives alone on his family farm near Ballina. “Dev was the first character I had a sense of,” says Barrett. “I knew he would be the conduit through which the whole story came.”
The novel opens as Dev’s thuggish cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, arrive in the middle of the night, having just kidnapped Doll, a feckless teenager whose older brother, Cillian, owes them money for drugs. In Barrett’s hands, the three-day hideout at the farmhouse provides a brilliant occasion for comedy of menace, as entertaining as it is harrowing. At one point, Gabe fusses that Doll isn’t eating enough; soon after, in a mercurial fit, he tries to drown him in the bathtub. Why Dev, not a bad person, allows them to stay is a mystery that the novel deliberately doesn’t answer. Says Barrett: “That was what I found fascinating: What if circumstances – in the most dramatic way possible – were compelling him to action, and he still resisted?”
By contrast, Nicky rises to the urgency of the crisis created by the kidnapping. Running parallel to her journey of empowerment – most electrifying in the ethically compromised part she plays helping the English family raise Doll’s ransom money – is the poignant recognition that there’s not much left to keep her in Ballina. “It’s a world that she’s saying goodbye to throughout the course of the book,” says Barrett. “When you’re 17, to make that leap is a daunting prospect. As much as you want it, you can be wary of it. I tried to capture that.”
In Wild Houses Canada provides a more drastic kind of exit strategy. County Mayo is known, historically, as a place to leave, typically from economic necessity but also from claustrophobia, even shame. Among the locals in Ballina, the English brothers – Cillian and Doll – are never allowed to forget that their alcoholic father, Vincie, has abandoned the family, and is thought to be drinking out his days in Calgary. Barrett explains, a touch apologetically, “Canada is a wonderfully useful, othering place that you can send your characters to.” When one of the kidnappers orders Cillian to clear out of town and join his “oul fella” in Calgary, he clearly means it as a punishment.
Once again, Canada has played a real-life role when Barrett’s wife, a doctor, took a job in Toronto in 2017. Their second child was born during the family’s six-year sojourn, and Barrett wrote several short stories and completed Wild Houses. His Canadian experience was also powerfully shaped by the pandemic. When day-care centres closed in 2020, Barrett became a stay-at-home father in a small apartment. Writing was only possible in short spurts or in the evening. He recalls going out jogging late at night in the empty-seeming, upscale neighbourhood of Summerhill in midtown Toronto. “It was eerie, and left a hell of an impression.”
A source of therapeutic relief was his one and only Toronto story, The Low Shimmering Black Drone, a formally inventive, surreal tale set during lockdown and written in 2020. Even after the family’s extended stay, Barrett claims he doesn’t understand Canada well enough to write about it. “I’m afraid I still associate Toronto with that purgatorial non-time we all had to live in. Hopefully, the rest will come back to me. It’s very important, because it’s where our kids were when they were little babies.”
An active mentor to a new cohort of Irish writers, Barrett will take up the post of writer-in-residence at University College, Dublin. He is also at work on a second novel, still in the early stages. True to precedent, the new novel is set in a small town in western Ireland, but the characters are closer to him in age and experience. “It’s not going to be about drug dealers, anyway. One character will be an artist, that’s new for me,” he says, pausing, as if reluctant to jinx a delicate process. “We’ll see: Something catches, a character, and you have to just follow it. But there’s definitely something there.”