Days Without End

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.

I have said many times that I love an Irish storyteller and Sebastian Barry is one of the very finest. In Days Without End, Barry has achieved something remarkable: telling a tale of the Wild West and the Indian Wars, as well as the American Civil War and its aftermath, making of it all an Irish story. Told from the point-of-view of a barely lettered refugee from the Great Potato Famine, the voice here is slightly naive, unsure how to express itself, and suffused with pure Irish lyricism; line by line, this read was a delight. From the characters to the setting to the tragic plot featuring real events, I loved everything about this book; and especially its balance between tenderness and horror. I loved the writing so much that I can't help but quote at length.

I only say it because without saying I don't think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with. We knew what to do with nothing, we were home there. I almost wasn't able to say, my father died too. I saw his body. Hunger is a sort of fire, a furnace. I loved my father when I was a human person formerly. Then he died and I was hungry and then the ship. Then nothing. Then America. Then John Cole.

Days Without End is the reminiscences of Thomas McNulty: After his entire family died in the Famine, the young boy got passage on a ship to Canada, and after surviving that hellish voyage and a mandatory quarantine in the Fever Camps of Quebec, he made his way to America; eventually fetching up under a hedge to escape a storm in Missouri and there meeting John Cole (around Tom's same age of thirteen or fourteen, John needed to escape starvation himself when his family's New England farm failed). The pair decide to throw in together and soon find employment (of a most delightful sort which I don't want to spoil; I'll just say that I bought the concept 100%). After the pair turn seventeen(ish – they're never certain of their ages), they decide to go West and join the army; clearing the Plains of the Indians who might balk at broken treaties and stolen land. There are brutal scenes of violence (to which, as Tom quoted above notes, his history has numbed him; he fights not for philosophy, but to earn his bread) and a larger story arc is set in motion that will play out over the course of the book. When the Civil War breaks out, Tom and John join the rest of their militia group in signing up with the Northern side, and while I loved the irony of colour guards of units from both the Union and the Confederates carrying flags emblazoned with shamrocks and golden harps as they meet on the field of conflict, the battle scenes themselves are blunt and relentless, showing the fighting to be senseless and unheroic:

We're stopped in our charge and kneel and load and fire. We kneel and load and fire at the side-on millipede of the enemy. Our batteries belch forth their bombs again and the Confederates balk like a huge herd of wild horses and run back ten yards and then ten yards reversed again. They greatly desire to reach the cover of the far woods. The batteries belch behind, they belch behind. Some bombs come so low they want a path through us too and many fall in our lines as a missile forges a bloody ditch through living men. A frantic wariness infects our bones. We load and fire, we load and fire. Now in the burgeoning noise dozens of shells hit into the enemy, sharding them and shredding them. There is a sense of sudden wretchedness and disaster. Then with a great bloom like a sudden infection of spring flowers the meadow becomes a strange carpet of flames. The grass has caught fire and is generously burning and adding burning to burning. So dry it cannot flame fast enough, so high that the blades combust in great tufts and wash the legs of the fleeing soldiers not with soft grasses but dark flames full of roaring strength. Wounded men fallen in the furnace cry out with horror and affront. Pain such as no animal could bear without screeching, tearing, rearing.

And yet to balance this, there is also a tale here of love and loyalty, of a kind of duality in all things, that lends itself to sweeter lines. Again, not to spoil anything, I'll note that on Goodreads I was able to hide the following long quote behind spoiler tags, and since I can't here, I'll caution against reading it if you care about spoilers and reiterate: I bought this 100%:

Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the pitch plains. In the beautiful blue night there was plenty of visiting and the braves was proud and ready to offer a lonesome soldier a squaw for the duration of his passion. John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The berdache puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.

After the Civil War and having tried their hands at other trades, Thomas is enlisted in one more campaign against the Indians – the Oglala Sioux; once proud and strong, now starved and draped with castoff rags – and you can see the evolution of his worldview after a climatic massacre; Tom's now ironic estimation of this kind of soldiering:

The troopers came back up the hill lathered in blood and gore. Spattered with tendrils of veins. Happy as demons in the commission of demon's work. Exultant and shouting to each other. Drenched in a slaughterhouse of glory. Never heard such strange laughter. Big hill-high sky-wide laughter. Clapping of backs. Words so black they were blacker than dried blood. Remorse not a whit. Delight and life perfected. Slaughter most desirable. Vigour and life. Strength and heart's desire. Culmination of soldiering. Day of righteous reckoning.

To have made an Irish story out of the most American of events – the clearing of the Plains, the American Civil War – was not only cleverly accomplished, but feels justified by history: Just how many unschooled lads from Sligo and Dublin did escape the Great Famine only to live and die as American soldiers in order to earn their daily portion? The plot here is inevitably tragic – and there's a bleak literary satisfaction in watching sympathetic characters assume their inevitable roles in a tragedy – but there is redemption, too. I loved the writing at the sentence level and everything these sentences add up to: a total gem.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves