Book review: Beatlebone imagines John Lennon on his remote Irish island in 1978, screaming
This existential novel is so good for so long that its eventual unravelling doesn’t really matter terribly much
by Kevin Barry
Doubleday
In 1967, John Lennon bought a small island off the west coast of Ireland called Dorinish. It wasn’t much of an island, just a pasture and some rocks, which, Kevin Barry tells us in his second novel, Beatlebone, “were harvested for ballast by the local fishing fleet”. Although Lennon wanted to establish a utopian community on Dorinish (in the early 1970s, he invited a group to start a commune on the land), he visited the island just twice.
The story is intriguing, not least because it’s rare to come upon a lesser-known narrative about the Beatles – and yet the unexpected turn of Barry’s novel, which imagines a 1978 trip by Lennon to Dorinish, is that it isn’t really about the singer at all.
“The idea,” the author writes late in the novel, “was that I would get to the island and I would Scream, I would Scream until I was hoarse and my throat was cut and ribboned, and I would let out all of the green bile that seeps up in a life.”