There is something in the way that he breathes that stops all the time inside. Here he is on Lennon as a parent: “By night he”ll creep in on tiptoes to watch the child sleeping. Barry, whose previous novel, “City of Bohane,” won the International Dublin Literary Award, is a genius of the language, teasing out impressionistic riffs that channel emotion into words. “Beatlebone” is more an existential novel than a rock ”n” roll one, and so good for so long it doesn”t really matter when it unravels in the end. Such expiation sits at the center of “Beatlebone,” which posits something similar for Lennon: the desire to spend three days alone on Dorinish screaming, in the hope that he”ll emerge from the experience cleansed. “The idea,” the author writes late in the novel, “was that I would get to the island and I would Scream, I would Scream until I was hoarse and my throat was cut and ribboned, and I would let out all of the green bile that seeps up in a life - the envy, the jealousy, the meanness - and I would let out all the hate - especially the hate - and I would Scream to the grey sky above me and Scream to the stars and taunt the night.” Sure, there are identifying traces: This Lennon lives at the Dakota and he longs to “work again and breathe again and write again, and not be locked to the … past - that he might play again - not locked to the past - that he can write again - not locked to the past and its same old song.” But he is also tormented in ways that may have less to do with Lennon than with Barry himself. The story is intriguing, not least because it”s rare to come upon a lesser-known narrative about the Beatles - and yet the unexpected turn of the novel, which imagines a 1978 trip by Lennon to Dorinish, is that it isn”t really about the singer at all.

It wasn”t much, just a pasture and some rocks, which, Kevin Barry tells us in “Beatlebone” (Doubleday, $24.95, 320 pages), “were harvested for ballast by the local fishing fleet.” Although Lennon wanted to establish a utopian community on Dorinish (in the early 1970s, he invited a group to start a commune on the land), he visited the island just twice. In 1967, John Lennon bought a small island off the west coast of Ireland called Dorinish.