I may be a bit biased, but here goes: This is one of my favorite books of the year.

It starts out slow. The preface, by Stuart Moulthrop, was a bit overwrought, and you’d be okay skipping it. The slow start, the boredom, you suspect, may be intentional. But it almost lost me, who is an admittedly patient reader, especially for Michael, willing to give him a lot of rope with which to hang himself and neighboring parties. About 40 pages in I was on the cusp of leaving it for another read, but soldiered through, and it was at about that mark where the story took off. Unraveled, to a degree, and picked up the pace. The awkward entrance into the hot tub was complete: the tentative sensitive portions of your body had been burned sufficiently with little enough lasting damage that it now felt comfortable, right. Or perhaps, more in line with a theme from the book, you, the reader, had learned the controls of this new video game, and now were fully immersed in the experience.

If you’ve read any Joyce before it covers common themes from his other works. I still think I rank The War Outside of Ireland as one of my favorite books of all time, but the more time I’ve spent thinking about how this book unraveled and came together in the end I find myself appreciating it more and more. It feels very hyper textual, and I can imagine Michael writing the bulk of the work, with all its intertwining strands, in Storyspace, which is where his more famous hyperfictions have been created, of course.

And, like his other works, this one is beautiful, elegiac, and lyrical. In addition to disappearance there is the other side of the coin; loss, that figures heavily. It may not be for everybody, but if you can slog through the opening scene setting and give yourself over, you’ll find a brilliant read.

So. I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at those Rotten Tomatoes reviews and the trailer and thinking, “This is going to be AWESOME! BRING IT ON!”

But you are going to be sorely, sorely disappointed. You are going to sit through the first few minutes of the film, hoping, praying, though you don’t often pray, that it will get better. Time will appear to slow down. This is, in part, due to the cameraman following the lead character for every single step of her foot race with a villain. You may not know this, but watching every single step of a footrace in vivid, 1080p detail, is actually really, really boring. Try it. You’ll have to get two friends, because being actively involved in the chase will provide too much excitement to get the feeling just right. With a pellet gun (or something, nothing that would cause fatal damage, mind), shoot one friend somewhere tender. Then quickly hand the gun to the other friend. Watch as the chase ensues (try not to shoot the first friend in somewhere that will prevent them from running quickly). It would be best, for you, if you had a golf cart, to follow along. So ride your golf cart alongside your friend and your friend in pursuit. Maybe have someone else drive you, so you can focus on the pursuer’s face the entire time. Otherwise you might crash into a bank of trash cans, totally invalidating the experiment, and the next time you get your two friends together you can bet it will be a lot harder to shoot one of them without the other one tattling on you and getting you beat up. So while you’re watching the chase, you’ll probably start thinking: “Man, could I not get Angelina Jolie to do the pursuer part? And I don’t even like her all that much.” Anyway, try doing that for five to seven minutes.

For purposes of the experiment, it would be most helpful if you could get Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Hedy Lamarr all standing around. Maybe you could get hors d’oeuvres for them to munch on. Make sure you tell them that you would appreciate quiet, while you’re watching the chase, so they don’t disturb the environment you’re trying to set up. If you do get this setup, you’re pretty close to what this movie is like. Only less painful.

To really complete the simulation, have your friend, who’s driving the golf cart, every once in a while interrupt your observation of the chase to say something like: “Repeat that back to me.” “What did Michael just say?” “Why is Ewan eating the shrimp, he told me he was allergic to shellfish?” “Was Antonio just licking that tree frog? I TOLD him not to lick the tree frogs!” Make sure your friend says these things in clipped, military-like bursts. Also, if you do have a tree frog problem, the best way to deal with it is not to invite Antonio Banderas over to lick them all away, you should get proper pest control for that.

With all of these elements in place, you probably don’t need to watch this movie, or at least the first 30 or so minutes of it, which my wife and I suffered (well, if this is the extent of our “suffering” we’re kind of soft… but you see what I mean) through on Saturday night before finally ending our own suffering in an uncanny and, frankly, BRAVE move, and simply turned off the movie. We hugged each other and wept for a short period once the screen went black. And, after that moment, we emerged, stronger, more resilient, and I set off in search of a golf cart, pellet gun, and two friends.

This was an incredible book. Kevin Barry has a real lyrical tilt to his writing, he captures the raw, real feel of a the city of Bohane, a little outpost on the cold, murky Atlantic with such vivid strokes you believe, by the end, in this little city and all of its broken inhabitants. He’s done similar things, in the past, with his collection of short stories (There are Little Kingdoms), so I expected a good read, but have been let down by the high praise for other similar-ish works before, with similar blurbs: Joyceian, Flann O’Brian-esque… but, I have to say, Barry comes as close as you’re going to to living up to such high billing.

His recent New York Times Book Review cover was well deserved, and I feel he was shorted a bit, by having Pete Hamill write the review, because his review was something like his own writing (I’ve read his book Forever, which was a painful, stilted read), and didn’t quite do this book justice, with it’s bustling life to it.

So if you’re looking for a novel filled with sand pikeys, turf wars, Sweet Baba Jay appearing in the bogs, and the single greatest named character of all-time (F***er Burke), give this one a read.

The ending was quite good… brilliant, even, but I had to grit my teeth and listen through (audiobook) Bruen’s painfully too self-aware jack Taylor for the first four and a half hours (of a five hour reading).

I know that Bruen’s got a shining reputation as a master of Irish hard boiled crime fiction, but I find it too heavy handed, too obviously written, to be enjoyable as a story.