The unlikely pair embark on a series of diversionary side trips - ostensibly to throw the ever-encroaching “pressmen” off the former Beatle’s trail, but the reader might catch him- or herself wondering whether Cornelius, a character possessed of a kind of homespun flair for the dramatic, isn’t tipping the paparazzi off himself. “All I want,” John repeats, “is to get to my island.”īut knowing how to pronounce the name of a place doesn’t bring the destination any closer. When morning finally comes, who but the very same Cornelius O’Grady comes to collect him, with the news that half the newspaper reporters in Dublin are “piling onto the Westport train” to catch a glimpse of Lennon. He bails out of the Mercedes at the edge of town and walks the rest of the way to his hotel. Three days to scream (as in primal), and though he “likes this driver,” it’s solitude he’s seeking. Three days alone on his island is all John is after. Somewhat moodily, John replies, “I just want to get to my island.” “You’ve the look of a poor fella who’s caught up in himself,” he says. Cornelius speaks in “a very smooth timbre, deep and trustworthy like a newscaster.” He assesses his famous passenger in the rearview mirror. The conceit is that in 1978, two years before his murder in New York City, he traveled there alone on a walkabout of sorts.Īs Barry’s yarn opens, the fictional Lennon is en route to his hotel, slumped in the back seat of a Mercedes piloted by a driver/fixer/shape-shifter called Cornelius O’Grady. The fact at the core of Kevin Barry’s second novel, “Beatlebone,” is that in 1967, John Lennon purchased an uninhabited island off the west coast of Ireland which, although he set foot there on less than a handful of occasions, he owned until the day he died. Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” (about the early jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden) and Nick Tosches’ “In the Hand of Dante” (about, among other things, the writing of “The Divine Comedy”) come to mind, both masterly literary extrapolations. Some of the very best fiction is spun from a single filament of fact woven tightly - or loosely, if necessary - in and out of an asymmetrical framework of empathy, imagination and sheer audacity.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry