Two important Sebastian Barry novels that should be read far and wide

I’ve just finished reading two of Sebastian Barry’s most recent novels: Days Without End published in 2016 (I read this one and then listened to the audio book as well), and A Thousand Moons published last year. Both have touched me deeply and brought, once again, to the fore the importance of revisiting and assimilating our world’s turbulent history.

Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet who has won myriad literary awards for his work. Little wonder, as his novels are truly outstanding with a lyrical style of prose perpetually rich in atmosphere and imagery. His characters come alive as he endows them with the honest, compassionate and often humorous voices so typical in grammar and expression of early nineteenth-century America. His novels sweep you up from the opening paragraph, as though you are listening to the narrator reclining fireside and personally recounting their life story to you. Consequently, I nearly read this in one sitting, as though it might’ve been considered rude if I stopped before he’d finished telling his tale.

Though fictional, Barry’s novels might as well have been true accounts, as they are based on well-researched and accurate history surrounding the American Indian Wars and Civil War and the continued prejudice and violence that occurred in the South subsequently. Both are important titles that should be read far and wide – and perhaps even be considered as set works – to ensure we never forget, and never repeat, such horrors.

In Days Without End, the narrator is Thomas McNulty, who recounts his experience as a seventeen-year-old immigrant and survivor of the Irish potato famine, and who, upon arriving in America, is left with little choice but to become a soldier fighting in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Surviving both, he is then faced with the prevailing violence and racism of post-war Tennessee.

The scenes that Barry describes are so horrific and the acts so cruel that one almost wants to put the book down. And, as if in agreement, the protagonist McNulty at one stage reflects that he has witnessed enough tragedy to darken 10 lifetimes. But then, just as you think you can’t take anymore, Barry reels you back in with beautiful scenes of sudden heart-warming tenderness and joy.

McNulty derives said joy from his relationship with comrade-in-arms John Cole, whom he met as young boy when both were still scrounging for food in a frontier town. Throughout two army campaigns across the South and West, they pledge to look out for each other. After the end of the Indian Wars, they adopt Winona, a young Sioux girl whose whole tribe was wiped out and who becomes a daughter to them.

A Thousand Moons is a companion novel to Days Without End and is set in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Here, the narrator is Winona Cole, the orphaned child of the Lakota Indians who was taken in by Thomas McNulty and John Cole and finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. I simply adored the voice Barry accorded her. She describes her life in such a lyrical and beautifully metaphorical way that I found myself rereading passages for the literary thrill of them.

Finally, here is a rare instance of a male novelist succeeding in depicting a female character and her inner thoughts realistically, authentically and insightfully.

The harshness of racism and the disregard of Native Americans as illegal citizens of no value in a state still caught up in the bitter legacy of the Civil War filter through to Winona’s unconventional family’s fragile harmony, which comes under threat from a further traumatic event, one which she struggles to understand, let alone confront.

As with Days Without End, the second novel is exquisitely written and is, as one reviewer put it, ‘a stirring, poignant story of love and redemption, of one woman’s journey and her determination to write her own future’.