In a recent interview, Irish writer Kevin Barry revealed that his “ambition is to write the three-hour novel where the reader could sit down and just fall into this world completely.” In THE HEART IN WINTER, a tragicomic Western adventure and love story he says he’s been trying to write for a quarter century, he’s succeeded spectacularly. His intended reader’s only regret will be that this painstakingly crafted story comes to an end far too soon.

The book begins in 1891 in the town of Butte, Montana, a place that’s “screeching and crazy and loud as the depths of hell.” Filled with brothels and bars with names like the Cesspool and the Bucket of Blood, this center of the copper mining industry is home to a substantial community of Irish immigrants, including County Cork’s Tom Rourke, a resident for nine years who is on the cusp of his 30th birthday. His tenure in the mines was brief and apparently hapless, and now he ekes out a living writing “songs for the bars and letters for the lonesome” that “helped to marry off some wretched cases already” and working as an assistant to one of the town’s photographers.

"Barry transforms the story’s mood with impressive ease, as it turns from idyllic to comic to terror-stricken with effortless grace.... But above all, sentence by sentence, the book is a pure pleasure to read."

When he’s not sharing a bed with Greta, one of Butte’s prostitutes, occasionally even offhandedly asking her to marry him, his principal activities include drinking, smoking opium, and doing his best to avoid the Croat landlady who’s on the verge of evicting him from her rooming house for delinquent rent. There was a “great hauntedness to it all,” Tom thinks, as he wanders the town’s streets on a chilly October evening.

But his dissolute life is upended after Polly Gillespie arrives in town by train from Chicago. She’s the mail-order bride of Anthony Harrington, a captain of the Anaconda company. When the newlyweds appear for a marriage portrait in the studio where Tom works, a spark quickly erupts into a flame, especially after Polly discovers that her new husband is a religious zealot whose favorite activities include incessant, unintelligible prayer and literal self-flagellation.

It doesn’t take long for Tom and Polly’s affair to blossom into an ill-conceived scheme to flee Butte for San Francisco, where they’re confident they can begin a new life together. They leave town with a stolen palomino horse, only one aspect of the serious criminal conduct trailing in their wake. With the help of the town’s sheriff, the cuckolded Harrington hires a ruthless posse of three Cornish men, led by a giant named Jago Marrak, to give chase.

Barry expertly blends suspense and lyricism in his description of Polly and Tom’s trek through Montana’s magnificent forests and river valleys, desperately trying to “stay ahead of word of themselves” on their way to Pocatello, Idaho, where they plan to purchase tickets for a train that will take them to San Francisco. For the impulsive lovers, it’s a journey of romantic discovery amid challenging conditions, even as a mood of fatalism hovers over both of them and they’re “made giddy by the fear sometimes.”

One of Barry’s signal achievements is to almost instantly incline the reader’s sympathies toward Polly and Tom as they flee the murderous Marrak and his men, who are bent on receiving a sizable payday if their mission is successful. Neither one of the couple has much in the way of relevant skills in a wilderness that quickly becomes harsh and dangerous as fall turns to winter. But in their moments of intimacy and introspection, they’re revealed as more complex and interesting people than their self-indulgent and less than honorable pasts might suggest. “They had an aspect of cool affront to life,” Barry writes, “and so it was deathwards they were drawn—”

Barry transforms the story’s mood with impressive ease, as it turns from idyllic to comic to terror-stricken with effortless grace. The novel’s cast of supporting characters is small but meaningful. It includes bartender Fat Con Sullivan, whose “belly slid the counter like some class of pup seal and arranged itself complacently,” and the Reverend, who describes himself as a “zealot man in a heathen land” and who they come upon with the freshly buried body of his traveling companion, Tater Collins, nearby.

But above all, sentence by sentence, the book is a pure pleasure to read. It overflows with writing as bracing as the wintry wilderness mountain air that Tom and Polly breathe as they flee their pursuers. Barry possesses an almost Joycean fondness for apt and evocative neologisms like “dawnsmoke,” “rainhaze” and “winterbared,” and the novel is liberally sprinkled with hilarious examples of Irish slang, much of it of the profane variety. “Books should be fun. We invented books to get us through the long, dark nights, you know,” Barry told his recent interviewer. In THE HEART IN WINTER, one couldn’t ask for a finer companion.