Night Boat to Tangier

Night Boat to Tangier (2019), a novel by Irish author Kevin Barry, follows two aging Irish gangsters—Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond—as they loiter at a ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain, hoping to encounter Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly. Against this present-day backdrop, Barry unfurls the story of the two men’s life of crime and the collapse of Maurice’s family. Best known for his 2013 debut, City of Bohane, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Barry has also won the Goldsmiths Prize (2015).

The novel opens in the dingy ferry terminal at the Fort of Algeciras, Spain, “as awful a place as you could muster — you'd want the eyes sideways in your head. It reeks of tired bodies, and dread."

Two men in their early fifties, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, are killing time, exchanging barbed witticisms in Cork accents. As we eavesdrop on their conversation, we learn that they are waiting for Maurice’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Dilly Hearne, whom neither man has seen for three years. She has been living as a “dreadlocked Rastafarian” in Spain, but Maurice and Charlie believe that she will soon arrive in the terminal, on a ferry from Tangier. She doesn’t know that the men are waiting for her.



While they wait, Maurice and Charlie corner and interrogate any dreadlocked young traveler they see, and we see that the men are practiced in intimidation. Their grins are “high and piratical; their jauntiness has a cutlass edge.”

The novel jumps back in time to the mid-1990s, to find a vigorous young Maurice in love with the alluring Cynthia, also from Cork. Maurice and Charlie—his best friend—approach a Spanish woman, Karima, who helps them to smuggle heroin from Spain to Ireland. The business quickly becomes lucrative, but almost immediately, the first sign of trouble appears: Maurice begins sleeping with Karima behind Cynthia’s back.

In Algeciras, Maurice is lamenting his “bad luck,” which he (only half-seriously) ascribes to his building houses on the site of a fairy fort in the west of Ireland. Life, Maurice opines, is horrifying at its core, and only seven things have the power to distract a person from this truth: love, grief, pain, sentimentality, greed, lust, and the desire to die.



Back in the 1990s, Maurice and Charlie’s partnership with Karima is making them rich. Maurice invests his profits in building property in Ireland, benefiting from the “Celtic Tiger” boom in the Irish property market. Cynthia becomes pregnant and gives birth to Dilly. Maurice is determined to be a good father, but his determination is undermined by his burgeoning drug addiction. He and Charlie take their “breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror.” Maurice continues to be unfaithful to Cynthia, and when she learns of some of these affairs, their marriage begins to break down. By the end of the 1990s, the friends’ addiction is beginning to take its toll on their business, too, with a growing lack of self-control leading to some poor decisions.

Back in Algeciras, Maurice and Charlie do not notice Dilly’s arrival. She spots them, and she is surprised. She hesitates: her first instinct is to leave at once. However, she loves both men, and she wants them to know that she forgives them.

The narrative returns to the early 2000s, where Maurice and Charlie’s drug empire is collapsing. The two men’s friendship collapses, too, when Maurice discovers that Charlie and Cynthia have had an affair; Maurice attacks Charlie at a bar. This is the final nail in Maurice’s relationship with Cynthia too. Abandoning his failing business, Maurice sets off alone for Spain, where he drifts for several years, following his addiction from place to place while living in fear of encountering former criminal rivals.



The desire to reconnect with Cynthia and Dilly finally brings Maurice back to Ireland, but the years of drug abuse and paranoia have taken their toll, and he is committed to a mental institution in 2013. There he is reunited with Charlie, and the two men rebuild their friendship, aided by the fact that Cynthia is terminally ill. In conversation, both men admit that Dilly might, in fact, be Charlie’s daughter.

In Algeciras, Dilly decides to leave without speaking to Maurice and Charlie. The friends glimpse her as she leaves, and although they are sad that she doesn’t want to see him, they console each other with the fact that she looks strong and healthy and probably doesn’t need them for anything. The novel ends on a quietly optimistic note, as Maurice and Charlie look to the future together.

Reviewers praised Night Boat to Tangier for its “muscular, magical, and often salty prose” (Kirkus Reviews). The novel intertwines recent Irish history with reflections on the bonds of friendship and family, and on the effects of crime on the soul.