The other night, I saw two raccoons fucking on my neighbour’s roof. I was just going up to bed, happened to glance out the window, and there they were. The male was mounting the female from behind, her tail was stretched straight out backwards, his front paws were scrabbling at her sides, and he seemed to be struggling a bit, starting and stopping, as if unable to get a satisfactory rhythm going. They were on the very peak of the roof, their bodies silhouetted in pure black against the deep midnight blue of the sky, and above them was a slim, bright fingernail moon.
Now this, it occurred to me, is the sort of thing one could write a poem about. I would introduce a few comparisons—the sky as blue as a woman’s velvet dress, say, and the moon standing out against it like a link in a bright silver necklace. Too high flown? Too literally connected to the dress? Something more prosaic—perhaps the moon was like the bright curved indent a badly aimed hammer leaves on metal. Yes!
The Lyell Glacier hangs at a severe angle off the mountainside. To slip and fall can mean a long, fast plummet. Stock wore crampons on his boots and carried an ice ax as he stepped onto an ice field riddled with sun cups, bathtub-sized depressions that forced him to walk along blade-thin ridges between them. Standing at the edge of the dark patch, Stock got a terrible feeling.
“I just knew. That’s bedrock. Your wishful thinking that that’s debris can’t possibly be right. The next thought was, If that’s bedrock, there can’t be much glacier left.” Letting his eye roam the periphery of the ice and visualizing mountain contours beneath the main mass of the glacier, Stock struggled to form a mental model in which the glacier maintained significant volume. He could not picture more than about 20 or 30 feet of thickness. Given the Lyell’s melt rate, it would disappear in four or five more years of drought. The shock of this realization forced Stock to confront what the data had been hinting at: The Lyell was no longer a glacier at all. Put another way, the Lyell Glacier was already dead, and Stock was the last person ever to study it.
With help from a deeply sly sense of humour and the beautifully rendered landscapes that sometimes seem to be the only genuinely no-bullshit presences in the story, he always produces a burst of emotional colour, accompanied by a bittersweet warmth we can all recognise. It’s the literary equivalent, perhaps, of the yeasty fug of humanity he invites us into: the fights, funerals and extramarital sex; the declining pain of one or another kind of injury, physical or psychic, sustained or handed out. These lives are framed by love, or “what love became when it hardened into history”.
It’s quite a leap from North Lanarkshire to South Africa in the early 20th century; but in a continuation of the style developed through his memoir, Barr’s first novel is distinguished by its compassion, its wisdom and its remarkable sense of poetry.