The City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

It was the eve of May at the Supper Room, and Tommie the Keep had the ceiling fans set to their highest rachet, and they whirred noirishly against the night, and were stoical, somehow, like the old uncles of the place, all raspy and emphysemic (230).

Barry's novel is written in a kind of future Irish brogue, it seems, and Barry is willing to invent language that invests his descriptions with precision of tone and of image.  To begin the fortieth chapter, Barry invokes a "noirish" whirring of the ceiling fans.  The ceiling fans in your living room may be nothing, but the description of them here sets the tone for the rest of the short chapter, and indeed for the final chapter of the book which follows.

"Noir" is not just about darkness or night.  Girly Hartnett, the 90-year-old matriarch of the organized crime family that runs the city of Bohane, is a movie buff, and requests films by actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  "Noirishly" invokes an image of Hollywood of the 40's: black & white, romantic, full of mystery and murder and hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade, love and violence together without irony or offense.  Girly's requests, however, are not specifically noir films, but do suggest gang or crime-related films. Girly requested movies by Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood, both of whom had been such films.  Wood, for example, starred in both Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story.  The Wanderer, a film delivered by Girly's son for her, focused on Italian street gangs in 1963.

To say that the ceiling fans "whirred noirishly," then, is to suggest a complex interplay of theme, tone, and image, recalling the crime-dramas and attitude of the bygone days of Hollywood.  These fans are stoic, like the hardboiled detectives of these crime-dramas, yet also "raspy and emphysemic."  The days of old are, after all, distinctly old.  They are aged, antique at least, as old as Girly herself.  The matriarch of the family has left her mark, not just on the city at large, but even on each back alley bar, right down to the sound of the stoic yet sick-sounding ceiling fans.

Barry, Kevin. The City of Bohane. Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press, 2012.