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Commentary
Ciara Moynihan, interview with Colin Barrett, in Mayo News (19 Nov. 2013): speaks of influence of Kevin Barry: "“Kevin Barry is a big influence,” Barrett says, without hesitation. “I’m a great fan of his. Comparisons have been made between his work and mine once or twice. [“There are Little Kingdoms’] first came out back in 2006 or 2007, and I found it maybe a couple of years later, and loved it. His stories are great. / “I’d been reading other authors - I’d gone through being a big fan of American literature, and I’d read John McGahern, James Joyce, Dermot Healy, Pat McCabe and so on. But Kevin Barry, it was something different. Something contemporary. He was using the here and now as material. And I had a moment - I realised “Oh, you CAN write about it, you can write about contemporary country Ireland if you want, and you can do it in an irreverent way and in a way that is alive to you’.”

Alison Flood, ‘Frank O’Connor short story award goes to “new, young, genius” Colin Barrett’, in The Guardian (11 July 2014) - remarks that Young Skins has already drawn stunning reviews; quotes Barrett: [Young Skins is] ‘[s]et among the lives of the young people of a fictional small Irish town - the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.’

Further [quoting Barrett] - ‘I’m from a small town in the west of Ireland. I left for Dublin as people do, and I suppose I wanted to take a look at that world, so isolated, to recreate it with its own games and hierarchy and rules of the jungle. [...] It’s its own discrete world, with its own rules, and I wanted to play with that, with the madcap energy and wildness that you get in these places, where people live in an enclosed environment.’ Barrett says the collection was called Young Skins ‘because most of the protagonists are youngish, from their teens to their 20s. A couple are slightly older people - but they are sufficiently psychologically arrested to come under the description of young people.’ ‘The collection opens in the voice of the hung-over Jimmy, who tells the reader: “My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near.”’

Lily Ní Dhomhnaill, TWO[TN2] Magazine: Alternative Culture for Students (10 Dec. 2013): ‘Colin Barrett’s stark debutYoung Skins examines the lot of the young male in small-town Ireland with icy clarity. In the fictional town of Glenbeigh (“My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk”) the striking Mayo coast becomes setting for seven tales of violence, loneliness and self-destruction. A place of stinted relationships and unfulfilled ambitions, Bord Fáilte brochure for the West of Ireland, it is not... But don’t let all that put you off. Barrett’s obvious joy in language keeps the book from melting into a complete puddle of gloom. The ease with which he strings words together makes for a rich register, with the loose cadence of a soft Irish lilt... Dialogue is sharp and colourful, descriptions shrewd and evocative, and the desperate, desolate characters will haunt you stubbornly when you’ve finished.’ (Available online; accessed 12.07.2012.)

Edmund Gordon, ‘Do you wish to continue?’, review of Homesickness, in London Review of Books (4 Aug. 2022) - Gordon contrasts Barrett with Sally Rooney from the same Mayo landscape and notes that he registered the absence of female characters in his first book as a "limitation". He writes of Homesickness: "His new book shows his efforts to expand his range. Women are at the centre of a couple of the stories, but most are about men whose vitality has started to wane, sometimes as a result of age, sometimes because they’ve hit a personal or professional dead-end." The review entails quotations [as given below] and concludes: ‘[...] Most of the stories in Homesickness take place in the vicinity of Ballina and Castlebar, but there’s also a lockdown story set in Toronto, where Barrett currently lives. Its narrator has latched onto a famous writer (‘by which I mean famous for a writer’) as a kind of surrogate father. His actual father is a feckless alcoholic who, whenever he reaches a point ‘where he was sufficiently remorseful and afraid and sick enough to want to stop’, calls the emergency services and threatens suicide, using his subsequent hospitalisation as a ‘de facto detox’. The narrator is looking after the famous writer’s dogs when he receives a call from the latest hospital: a nurse informs him that a routine colonoscopy of his father has revealed ‘a cluster of large and serrated polyps’. The shock of this news causes the narrator to lose one of the dogs. That’s more or less it: he leaves his father a sympathetic voicemail, but there’s no breach of the emotional ramparts. When he tells the famous writer about the dog, he’s rebuked ‘with wounding mildness’, which seems to be broadly the effect the story is going for. It isn’t unsuccessful at this, but the resulting wound is pretty shallow compared to any that Arm inflicted. / It would be churlish to hold Barrett’s discovery of the soft pedal against him: it’s had a salutary effect on his sentences, which have become snappier since Young Skins, less enamoured of fancy vocabulary and self-consciously poetic cadences, and in the right mood he can still deliver blasts of raucous entertainment. The best story in Homesickness follows three brothers, Rory, Eustace and Bimbo, who in spite of their ‘shortish’ frames and ‘massive arses’ are known to everyone as the Alps (a nickname that gives the story its title). The brothers work together (‘what they did was try things at a competitive rate. They painted, wired, plumbed, tiled, but where they excelled was in the displacement of the earth: digging holes, filling holes back in’) and spend most of their free time together (‘they ate too much takeaway, slept fitfully, downed vats of Guinness every weekend’). At the beginning of the story, they’re drinking in the bar of the Swinford Gaels football club; a young man enters with a sword, something the brothers take a while to notice, ‘because who expects a sword?’ He seems disorientated, and claims to have walked all the way from Foxford, eleven miles down an unlit road. They offer him a drink. ‘It would be the general opinion held of me I should not drink,’ he says, much to their amusement (‘That would be the general opinion held of most of us, I reckon’), and they insist on buying him a Guinness. Things soon get out of hand and by the end Rory is claiming he’s in a fit state to give the young man a lift to hospital: ‘I would say I drive better with drink taken ... because I know I have to be more careful.’ It’s a wonderful performance, skilfully balanced between comedy and pathos, and a reminder of how dynamic Barrett can be when he gives his characters permission to cut loose. Rory, Eustace and Bimbo may have ‘bloodshot eyes, pouched necks and capitulating hairlines’, but there’s a big difference between them and most of the other characters in this collection: ‘the Alps still felt young in their souls." (Available online; accessed 14.08.0222 [password required].

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Quotations

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