Some novels sing from the first line, with every word carrying the score to a searing climax, and Days Without End is such a book. It has the majestic inevitability of the best fiction, at once historical but also contemporary in its concerns.
The story opens in 1851 Missouri with the laying out of the dead after battle, then settles into Thomas McNulty’s tale of his early life with bosom buddy John Cole, through the Indian wars, the Lincoln presidency, and the tragedy of the civil war to the safe haven of Tennessee in the 1870s. McNulty is a Sligo-born Irish American. His story becomes Sebastian Barry’s salute to the socio-cultural marriage between Ireland and the New World, expressed in prose that contrives to be both Irish and American, a remarkable sleight of hand.
Barry is an acclaimed playwright. He knows how to put his audience on the hook, but he’s more than just the dramatist of young men’s lives. His inner ear is tuned to a frequency that makes music with every sentence. A lyrical novel is a risky proposition, but he gives it breath in describing a very dark subject: how America came into its own on the frontier.
The American west of McNulty’s superb narration owes something to Twain, Whitman, Crane, and even Cormac McCarthy, but Barry is not content merely to pay homage to these masters. He transforms the blood-red landscape of middle America into the embodiment of the American myth – violent, transgressive, passionate, timeless and a little bit mad – a place that becomes both the subject of song and the song itself.
You could say that this is a western, but like the best of the genre, its vision fuses old and new: warfare, homecoming, gender politics, coming of age and romance. Days Without End is at once an affecting love story, and a nostalgic celebration of a long life. McNulty is writing in old age, looking back over 50 years, “and wondering where the years went”. There is nothing he needs to hold back. While he compiles his recollections, he’s also celebrating his discreet passion for another man, Cole. Barry’s achievement is to do this, in the first person, in a way that’s neither implausible nor mawkish.
There’s contemporary politics, too. Below the waterline, the novelist also wants to explore the way in which the dispossessed Irish who settled out west visited upon the Native American all the cruelties they had suffered at the hands of the British. Another parallel: the driving of the Native American tribes into internal exile mirrors the fate of many Irish during the famine.
Appropriately for a playwright, Barry begins with McNulty and Cole on stage, performing a cross-dressing routine for the miners of Daggsville. Both are just boys in search of some excitement and a living wage. Soon they enlist in the US army together and find themselves in a vicious war against the Sioux, in particular the ferocious chief, Caught-His-Horse-First. The boys’ unit gets caught up in war crimes. The upshot of savage retribution on both sides is that Cole and McNulty acquire a native American “daughter” named Winona. Their strange life as a threesome on the prairie becomes the emotional heart of Days Without End. Barry’s answer to those who might challenge its verisimilitude is simple: “I guess love laughs at history a little.”
His account of the civil war is impressionistic and brilliantly executed. In the fog of war McNulty gets captured by some Confederate rebels. When he is freed, his past catches up with him and he faces execution for desertion. But his sentence is commuted and he gets hard labour, noting ironically that “in the time of the hunger in Sligo a lot of men did that work, to feed their families”.
Barry has rarely written more affectingly than in these closing pages. When McNulty, released from all his sufferings, walks home, his route “sparkles with the beauty of woods and fields” and he traverses “the pleasing state of Missouri and Tennessee”. Days Without End is pitch-perfect, the outstanding novel of the year so far.
Days Without End is published by Faber & Faber (£17.99). Click here to buy it for £14.75
