Book Review - Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
The Salmon festival is taking place in Ballina and the town has a bit of a buzz about it. ‘Doll English and his girlfriend Nicky are at one of the ‘wild houses’ of the title - houses were there’s a a bit of drug taking and partying happening. Unfortunately for Doll, as he leaves the party he has the misfortune to run into the Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, two thugs who work for a local drug dealer.
Meanwhile, Dev Hendrick, dealing with isolation, panic attacks and the recent death of his mother, with his mental health in the gutter, responds to a knock on the door. It’s the Ferdia brothers, with Doll English, and they want to use Dev’s remote house to ‘look after’ their victim, who they’re using to put pressure on Doll’s brother Cillian, who owes a drug debt.
Dev and Nicky
The story is told from the point of view of Dev and Nicky. Dev is a likeable character, a reclusive giant of a man, struggling to hold it together. He’s conflicted over the use of his home for this ‘kidnap’ and has empathy for Doll. But he’s not strong enough to stand up to the brothers, so he’s complicit in the act.
Nicky is a bit younger than Doll, and working in a local hotel. She’s at the stage where she’s wondering if she has a future with Doll, who doesn’t seem to have any ambition. She’s pulled into the situation because of her attachment for her boyfriend, but can she ever hope of escaping the place? She’s lost both her parents, and shares an apartment with a lorry driving brother who’s never there. Her ties to the place are fraying.
Violence and Mental Illness
Anyone from a small Irish town will know that feeling of violence that sits just under the surface, especially with so much drugs about the place these days. There’s a casualness and savage unpredictability to it that Barrett does a great job in capturing here. You turned the pages at times just expecting the violence to erupt. He’s a great author at ramping up the tension.
He’s also good at depicting the mental illness, in the form of depression and anxiety, experienced by people at the margins of society -it felt grim and authentic. For all that, it’s not a completely bleak book, and contains plenty of humour, with zippy dialogue, and it’s a hard book to put down. The writing is sparse and real, and I was completely engaged with the characters and story.
‘Wild Houses’ put me in mind of Lisa McInerney or Kevin Barry, that sense of small town desolation, the hopelessness, and the ties that bind you to it and are bloody hard to escape. Micheal Magee also covered it particularly well in ‘Close to Home’ and how a drunken mistake could destroy your life.
One of the things I enjoyed about this book is that Colin Barrett could have easily padded it out. I’ve read books with less meat on the bones of the story that overstayed their welcome, despite being good books. This is a lean story, that’s long enough to get a good grip of you but ends at the right time.
It’s becoming ridiculous how many great Irish writers there are out there at the moment, and now we have another one to add to the list. I look forward to reading more by Colin Barrett.