On the back of his short-story collections, Young Skins and Homesickness, Colin Barrett was lauded by the Oprah Daily website as “a doyen of the sentence”. As accolades go, this has the dubious merit of being simultaneously embarrassing and accurate: a ludicrous phrase sullying a fair designation. Fair, because when reading Barrett, one is immediately struck by a sensation best described as relief: the realisation that one is in safe hands here; this is a writer of glaringly obvious talent, operating at a seriously high level. In Wild Houses we see for the first time Barrett’s evident abilities playing themselves out across the wider horizons of the novel form.
Readers familiar with Barrett’s work will immediately recognise the world of Wild Houses. Small-time County Mayo crooks Gabe and Sketch abduct Doll English, the younger brother of a local lad who owes them a few grand in drug debts. They all hole up for the weekend with Dev, a troubled and introverted soul whose remote farmhouse doubles as a convenient location to keep a hostage. From here we follow Doll’s girlfriend Nicky as she attempts to uncover what has happened and to bring Doll back home unharmed. In essence, the novel is a caper, the heaviness of the criminality undercut by bungles and incompetence. On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.
