Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry: book review

Night Boat to Tangier (2019) is set in the Spanish port of Algeciras in 2018, with flashbacks to 1994.

Twenty-three-year-old Dilly Hearne is missing.

In October 2018, two Irish gangsters are looking for her at the ferry terminal in the Spanish port of Algeciras, and waiting for the night boat to Tangier. At the port of Algeciras, “on such a clear night you could see an hour south to the lamps of Tangier.”

Maurice and Charlie are old drug-smuggling friends. Maurice is Dilly’s father. The story goes back to the time, in 1994, when Dilly is three years old and how Maurice and Charlie met in Cork, Ireland.

Now, in 2018, they wait and watch people coming and going from the terminal in Spain. They are hoping they will see Dilly to bring her home: ‘on the same bench, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit together alone but for their remorse.” Maurice is ashamed: “I’ve done a lot that’s wrong.” But he knows in his blood that Dilly is near.

Both men “know what they had once and what they lost.”

This is a poignant yet funny account of two men remembering one woman.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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