Revisiting John Lennon’s Beatle Island and the outlaws of Western fiction
Earlier this week, I published a story about Kevin Barry, the Booker Award-nominated Irish author whose terrific new book, “The Heart in Winter,” is a Western set in Montana circa 1891.
Barry’s book put me in mind of other Westerns that have made an impact on me and other readers, such as Charles Portis’s classic “True Grit,” Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood,” C. Pam Zhang’s “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” Anna North’s “Outlawed” and all those Cormac McCarthys.
Recently, when I was at the Altadena Public Library not far from Western legend Zane Grey’s former estate, I picked up a used copy of Ron Hansen’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and I’m on the lookout for “God’s Country,” a Western by Percival Everett. (And while it’s maybe not technically a Western, Peter Carey’s “True History of the Kelly Gang” is a gripping outlaw tale set in Australia.)
But while Barry and I discussed Western novels, films and notable coats, we also talked about a book of his that I wasn’t able to shoehorn into an already packed feature, his 2015 novel “Beatlebone.”
In Barry’s 1978-set story, a post-Beatles John Lennon heads to an island he owns off the Irish coast, a place that the musician owned in real life called Dorinish (or, according to the locals, “Hippie Island” or, of course, “Beatle Island”). I asked Barry about his own memorably elusive title.
“‘Beatlebone,’ I love as a title, but nobody could figure out that it was about John Lennon. I’ve been working with a great translator who’s translating it into another language, and he wants to call it ‘Beatle Island,’ because that’s what all the locals used to call John Lennon’s island in County Mayo,” says Barry. “I thought, You know what? That would make a lot of sense.”
More sense than “Beatlebone”?
“I don’t know, they’re tricky, titles,” he says.
When I told him how much I enjoyed the book, which had been suggested to me while on a book-buying mission (or, fine, a family vacation) in the U.K., he said it meant a lot to him as well: It had been his “most difficult book” to write.
“I gave myself a huge difficulty at the start, I decided that the main character was going to be an extremely iconic man – not just any old icon, you know, John [Flipping] Lennon, and you need a brass neck to get away with a novel like that,” says Barry, who says he spent four years on and off on it.
“I’m fond of it because I think it’s a good novel,” says Barry. “When I’m signing books in bookstores, it’s the one that the strange young men and the strange young women come up to me with a special feeling for and give me that kind of thousand-yard stare,” he says with a laugh. “That’s lovely. I like that. Yeah, it’s kind of my favorite in some ways, because of the difficulty of it.”
“The Heart in Winter” and “Beatlebone,” as well as his other books such as the wonderful “Night Boat to Tangier,” are in stores now. John Lennon’s “Mind Games” is out today in a refreshed-sounding Ultimate Collection version. And if you didn’t read it in the longer interview with Barry, I’ll mention it again: Kevin Barry’s audiobooks are fantastic.
*STORY GIFT LINK*
22 years later, Kevin Barry found the key to a novel he’d long meant to write
Michael Waters explores gender regulations at the Olympics
Michael Waters has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and elsewhere. A former New York Public Library Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in LGBTQ studies, Waters is the author of “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.”
Q. Would you tell readers a little about your book, please?
“The Other Olympians” traces the lost origins of gender regulations at the Olympics. Today, the Olympics are awash in efforts to define who is allowed to compete in women’s sports, mostly in the form of cruel anti-trans and anti-intersex policies.
These efforts actually trace back to 1936, the year that a prominent Czech sprinter named Zdeněk Koubek publicly transitioned gender and, after his career in women’s track, began living as a man. Koubek’s story was well received by the public, and he became a global celebrity, traveling to New York to perform on Broadway and to Paris to dance with Josephine Baker. People were just curious to understand how a gender transition like his was possible.
My book tells Koubek’s story, focused on what I came to see as this moment of incredible queer possibility for the world. The public were seeing these categories of male and female as more permeable than ever. It was just a small group of sports officials who saw gender transition as a problem.
Q. You wrote about sex testing at the Olympics in a recent op-ed. Can you share a little bit about the concept of gender surveillance in sports?
What struck me while researching this book is that the first sex testing policies passed in August 1936, at the Nazi-hosted Berlin Olympics, with little buy-in from the public. These first policies were designed to keep out any woman who didn’t fit traditional standards of femininity—it’s not exactly clear what that meant.
Most people didn’t know about these sex testing policies, and those that did criticized them. The American sprinter Ted Meredith, for instance, said in 1936 that “when the situation reaches a point where it is necessary to subject athletes to an examination to prove whether they sing bass or soprano, the subject becomes not only ridiculous but nauseous.”
Today, gender surveillance policies are still a feature of elite sports, but I argue in the book that perhaps we didn’t have to get to this point. In the 1930s, the public seemed ready to have a nuanced conversation about how male and female categories are imperfect.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers, whether about sports or any other type of book?
I refer back to two Olympics-related books a lot. One is “Fair Play” by Katie Barnes, a journalistic account that contextualizes the place of trans athletes in America today. The other is “Power Games” by Jules Boykoff, a political history of the Olympics that explores how the IOC works—and how that spills out into what we see on the field.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m toward the end of “Some Strange Music Draws Me In” by Griffin Hansbury, a novel that, among other things, is an incredibly funny, ambitious look at aging as a trans man. It explores how queer generations become disconnected from each other, as identity labels and social expectations change. I am loving it.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
The book that made me want to be a historian was “And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” Randy Shilts’ pathbreaking examination of the early years of the AIDS crisis in America, as it was still spreading in real time. I read “And The Band Played On” in high school, while I was trying to make sense of this queer community that I was entering into.
Shilts wrote this in an emergency, and I admired his ability to make the systems of power and oppression that kept politicians from taking AIDS seriously so legible. This book also helped show me who my queer elders were and what they had been through—something I think all young queer people should be encouraged to do.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I wrote a lot of the early pages on my phone, in the Notes app. I tend to get stuck on chapter beginnings, and sometimes turning off my computer, putting my phone on airplane mode, and just jotting down sentences in the Notes app (and figuring out how they fit together later) was the only way to stay on pace.
Writing on my phone feels like I’m making a grocery list, and suddenly I’m not so precious about every word.
Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?
I recently read “Mind Game” by Julie Kliegman, a wonderful nonfiction book about the mental health of athletes, and I can’t get over this one detail: In the 1950s, one of the founders of modern sports psychiatry was a hypnotist who claimed hypnotism could improve player performance.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
There’s no surer way for a book to win me over than to make me laugh without trying. To be clear, I can sometimes bump against self-consciously funny books where the comedy is the end goal. But I love a book that isn’t trying so hard, that just happens to have a narrator whose observations are so witty and precise you can’t help but be charmed. “Luster” by Raven Leilani and “Candelaria” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva are some of my favorite recent books for this reason.
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Got book plans this weekend? Here are some events to consider:
The OC Bookfair, which features panels, readings, book signings, and workshops, happens Saturday from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. in Old Town Tustin.
The International Printing Museum is hosting a Book Arts Bonanza for Families on Saturday. Get info about time, tickets, registration and more.
The North Figueroa Bookshop is hosting the first meeting of Obscenesters, a book club focusing on “the erotic, the abject and the queerly unclassifiable.” Hosted by Tina Horn, the group will be discussing “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.”
Next on ‘Bookish’
The next event is scheduled for Aug. 16, at 5 p.m. Cathryn Michon will discuss “I’m Still Here,” an illustrated book for grieving pet owners, and journalist Carol Mithers talks about “Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets.” Sign up for free now.
Want to catch up on all the previous Bookish shows? Catch up on previous virtual events and more!