Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Faber, £17.99)
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel follows two soldiers in mid-19th-century America—the narrator, an Irishman named Thomas McNulty, and his lover John Cole—as they do battle, first against Native Americans, and later against Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Along the way they adopt a Sioux orphan and put on a successful drag act. There is something life-affirming in Barry’s depictions of brutalised soldiers and burly miners enjoying burlesque cabaret—a glimmer, in extremis, of camaraderie and human tenderness.
Such respite is all too brief. When some of their men are ambushed by “Injuns,” the narrator and his cohorts mete out a retributive massacre, puffed up by the sense of duty that has sustained many genocidal enterprises: “We were about the people’s business, we had done something for the people.” McNulty is impassively efficient (“Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Over and over…”) but subsequently concedes “some strange seeping sadness for them.”
Days Without End is told in a realistic folk-yarn vernacular that blends pidgin grammar (“goed” for went; “could of” for “could have,” etc) with flickers of Biblical prolixity (“Sergeant Wellington… was desirous to shoot them.”) Barry’s Faulkner-esque narration is all the more evocative for its linguistic simplicity, whether describing the savagery of slaughter, the privations of war—the ravages of hunger and the elements—or sheer awe at the vastness of America’s physical space: “Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes.”
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel follows two soldiers in mid-19th-century America—the narrator, an Irishman named Thomas McNulty, and his lover John Cole—as they do battle, first against Native Americans, and later against Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Along the way they adopt a Sioux orphan and put on a successful drag act. There is something life-affirming in Barry’s depictions of brutalised soldiers and burly miners enjoying burlesque cabaret—a glimmer, in extremis, of camaraderie and human tenderness.
Such respite is all too brief. When some of their men are ambushed by “Injuns,” the narrator and his cohorts mete out a retributive massacre, puffed up by the sense of duty that has sustained many genocidal enterprises: “We were about the people’s business, we had done something for the people.” McNulty is impassively efficient (“Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Over and over…”) but subsequently concedes “some strange seeping sadness for them.”
Days Without End is told in a realistic folk-yarn vernacular that blends pidgin grammar (“goed” for went; “could of” for “could have,” etc) with flickers of Biblical prolixity (“Sergeant Wellington… was desirous to shoot them.”) Barry’s Faulkner-esque narration is all the more evocative for its linguistic simplicity, whether describing the savagery of slaughter, the privations of war—the ravages of hunger and the elements—or sheer awe at the vastness of America’s physical space: “Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes.”
