Tom Rourke is not quite a drifter, not quite a fixture of Butte, Montana – but so it is for all of its inhabitants in 1891, the year Kevin Barry’s first historical novel is set. Originally from County Cork, Rourke has made his way across the Atlantic, across a whole continent, to this frontier city where he works as a photographer’s assistant, smokes dope, and in his spare time writes letters on behalf of lonely miners to persuade young ladies to come from the east and marry them. One such is Polly Gillespie, betrothed and swiftly married to one Captain Harrington of the Anaconda mine.
Barry, who won the International Dublin Literary Award for his first novel, City of Bohane , and the Goldsmiths Prize for his second, Beatlebone , draws on the true stories of the Irish in the American West for The Heart in Winter . The Anaconda mine was purchased in 1880 by an Irishman, Marcus Daly, and located just outside Butte: by 1895 it was the largest producer of copper in the world. The nationality of its owner drew tens of thousands of his countrymen to Montana – Barry’s fictional Rourke among them.
One day Tom Rourke is tasked with assisting in taking the wedding portrait of Harrington and his bride – a bride whom Rourke may have had a hand in sourcing. In that moment between Tom and Polly it is love at first sight, or at least love of a particular kind: “He spoke to her at the end and he was another Irish and a doper type and she had a dark feeling all at once like a cl.