Soldiers -- United States -- Fiction. |
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United States -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction. |
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Summary
Summary
Two-time Man Booker Shortlisted AuthorCosta Award WinnerThomas McNulty, barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas fights in the Indian Wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barry's (The Secret Scripture) latest novel features Irish orphan boy Thomas McNulty, who departs Sligo during the potato famine to make his way to America. On the Missouri frontier, Thomas and best buddy John Cole work in a saloon dressing up as female dancing partners for local miners. When the boys mature enough to look more like men, they enlist in the Army, ending up as soldiers in the brutal Indian Wars while secret lovers at night. After their tour of duty ends, they head to Grand Rapids, where they perform onstage in drag, accompanied by Winona, a nine-year-old Sioux they care for like a daughter. With the Civil War looming, Thomas and John Cole join the Union Army, only to encounter more suffering and senseless violence fighting in the Valley of Virginia, then as prisoners of war at Andersonville. Eventually they are freed, but the past catches up: Winona's uncle, Catch-His-Horse-First , wants her back. Barry's description of Thomas's courageous effort to protect Winona achieves the drama and pathos of the author's best fiction. Other parts of the novel prove erratic. Despite moments of humor and colorful metaphors, Thomas's inconsistent, occasionally unconvincing narrative voice wavers between lyricism and earthiness. Thomas's trail of woe, though historically accurate, makes for onerous reading. The explicit battle scenes may also be difficult to take, but they have energy and intensity, in contrast with Thomas and John's love story, which traces without much drama how Thomas comes to realize he prefers dresses to a uniform. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* John Cole was my love, all my love, declares young Irish immigrant Thomas McNulty, who tells the story of their lives together in an unlettered but beautifully realized voice that is a tour de force of style and atmosphere. And the stories he tells! Of their joining the army as teenagers in the early 1850s and then, in the West, witnessing the massacre of Indians, of enduring punishing extremes of temperatures on the plains, of being mustered out of the army and then appearing onstage in a minstrel show, Thomas, with his beautiful face, dressed as a woman. Then, soldiers once again, this time in the Civil War, landing in the notorious prison of Andersonville. Then freed, they find a new life together in Tennessee but one that becomes haunted by the possibility of disaster and ruin. Their experiences are extravagant, yes, and, as Thomas says, The mind is a wild liar, but readers know he is telling the truth of the horrors the two witness in the horrible butcher shop of carnage where death is busy at his frantic task. But there are good times, too, as when they marry, unofficially adopt a young Indian girl, and find work on a friend's farm. Theirs is an epic romance, and Thomas' words are eloquent testimony to it. Evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, Days without End is a timeless work of historical fiction.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THOMAS MCNULTY IS an orphan, a refugee from Ireland's Great Famine, a crack shot, a cross-dresser and a halfhearted soldier, but mostly he's in love with a young man who, on their harrowing and tender adventures across the breadth of mid-19thcentury America, becomes so starved "you coulda used John Cole for a pencil if you coulda threaded some lead through him." "Days Without End" - the Irish writer Sebastian Barry's seventh novel, and the fourth to feature a member of the McNulty clan - is a haunting archaeology of youth, when "time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending." To the fatalism and carnage of classic westerns, Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant's peculiar lilt and a proud boy's humor. But in this country's adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable. Thomas first stumbles across John Cole beneath a hedge in Missouri, sometime around 1849, when the teenagers are just "two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world." Their first employment as dolled-up saloon dancers gives Thomas a taste for ladies' accouterments, but war, with its disregard for finery or flesh, keeps intervening. The friends join a platoon charged with clearing the West for whites and encounter Caught-His-HorseFirst, a chief of the Oglala Sioux who clasps the United States Army in the twostep of generosity and vengeance that will bloody the plains for generations, its "tremendous grasses folding, unfolding, showing their dark underbellies, hiding them, showing." In an interlude of peace, Thomas and John Cole the to the Midwest with the chief's niece, Winona, a placid child and ward of the Army, and Thomas once more dons "the stays and the corset and the bosom holder and the padded arse and the cotton packages for breasts" for nightly performances on behalf of the enraptured local miners. The Civil War interrupts this idyll, and the seesaw of petticoated peace and trousered violence continues its rhythmic tilting. The makeshift family develops sweetly, while the scenes of battle sear. Thomas claims "there is a seam in men called justice that nothing burns off complete" - moments before an Army sharpshooter kills the daughter of a retreating Sioux. Justice is a troubled concept here: Women and children are never spared, Irishborn Yankees bayonet Irish-born Rebels, and friendship is no defense against murder. Nor does our guide through this gory fantasia have clean hands. If Thomas's adoption of Winona, another chess piece in the prairie wars, is an attempt to shore up human decency, we learn too little about her own cultural cleavage. That two strange white men can so neatly become her parents belies the trauma of Indian dislocation. Barry draws parallels between the Irish and the American Indians - pushed out, despised, dispossessed - but he leaves Winona untethered from her identity as a Sioux. A few days after being taken from her people a second time, we find her "loosening too, and laughing now." It may seem incongruous to call a novel as violent as "Days Without End" dreamlike, but Barry's narrator is a gentle witness to brutality: neither reluctant nor rabid, but a semi-willing instrument - which is to say, like most of those who participate in war. In this brief business of existence, he explains, "we have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards." Atrocities come and go, love flourishes where it can, and justice turns out to be fickle, for the wicked and the innocent are punished alike. With uncommon delicacy, Barry reminds us that individual humans buzz about the land like mosquitoes: causing mischief, dying, being born, forgetting. Our recompense comes in those private moments when "love laughs at history a little." To the fatalism of westerns, Barry adds an immigrant narrator's lilt and humor. KATY SIMPSON SMITH is the author of the novels "The Story of Land and Sea" and "Free Men."
Guardian Review
Barry deftly explores notions of national identity and self-renewal as two young soldiers find intimacy amid the horrors of war Sebastian Barry 's commitment to telling the stories of two Irish families, the Dunnes and the McNultys, over several novels and multiple time frames and locations, has led to one of the most compelling, bravura and heart-wrenching fictional projects of recent memory. Its gaps and fissures, its silences, its elaboration of attachment, separation and loss amount to a profound meditation on the nature of national identity, enforced emigration and the dispersal of a people into lands frequently inhospitable and alienating, there to forge a new life. Days Without End, a fever dream of a novel that has much in common, particularly in terms of style, with Barry's prize-winning The Secret Scripture, presents us with Thomas McNulty, who has crossed the Atlantic to rebuild his life. The traumatic chaos of what he has left behind in Sligo -- his family dead from famine, his country "starved in her stocking feet. And she had no stockings" -- is more than matched by the horrors that he encounters in a US in the grip of self-creation, its expansionist violence underwritten by its adherence to the notion of manifest destiny. It is the 1850s, and Thomas has arrived in Missouri by way of Quebec, a journey that is revealed only in snippets that lightly inflect the novel. His brief explanation of the aptitude he and those like him show for soldiery -- "How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with" -- is later amplified by the nightmarish tale he hears from a fellow Irishman whose passage to the New World ends with corpses floating in the bilges, immured and abandoned. "That's why no one will talk," reflects Thomas, feeling that what has happened is simply not accounted as a subject. "That's because we were thought worthless. Nothing people. I guess that's what it was. That thinking just burns through your brain for a while. Nothing but scum." In the US, Thomas is many things, as Barry's mobile, ambiguous characters frequently are. At the beginning, having teamed up with a boy named John Cole, he is a dancer, rigged out in women's clothing to entertain miners starved of female company; a so-called "prairie fairy". But when the bloom of youth departs the pair at 17, they volunteer for the US Army and join the Oregon trail to California -- "weeks and weeks of riding and then turn left at some place I forget" -- to undertake a different kind of service. "We knew in our hearts our work was to be Indians," recalls Thomas; those who now regard themselves as the rightful occupants of the south-west want rid of them, at a price of two dollars a scalp. A brutal raid on an Indian settlement follows, its description made remarkable by Barry's trademark blend of forceful clarity and otherworldliness, his ability to scent the mundane in the apocalyptic and vice versa. In a passage that calls to mind one of The Secret Scripture 's most vivid and defining scenes -- that of an orphanage on fire -- the transformative effect of such destruction on its participants is memorably captured: "More sparks flew up, it was a complete vision of world's end and death, in those moments I could think no more, my head bloodless, empty, racketing, astonished ... We were dislocated, we were not there, now we were ghosts." The earlier book also resurfaces via the image of rats, here pictured as swarming emblems of the will to survive, "dozens of the critters swimming for their lives". But Barry's business extends beyond intense and visceral description, though that persists through a narrative that eventually encompasses the American civil war as well as increasingly complex interactions with indigenous communities. It also captures the development of Thomas and John's relationship, the men's sexual attraction to one another announced early in the novel by the simple, paragraph-long sentence: "And then we quietly fucked and then we slept." What makes this strand of storyline unexpected is that it ushers in an exploration of gender fluidity and a redefinition of family that seems to scream anachronism but is nonetheless convincing. That Thomas -- or, albeit briefly and in clandestine fashion, Thomasina -- dons a frock and marries John would test a literal reading; that they also act as parents to a Sioux child, Winona, who has been wrested from her family in an altogether more realistic plot development, is equally hard to credit. But it is of a piece with Barry's abiding preoccupation -- near obsession -- throughout the McNulty sequence with rupture and remaking. It is as if he is saying: if you can believe in a country laid waste for the want of its most basic crop, or a continent of persons displaced by frontier-lust, then why wouldn't you believe this? The willingness to suspend disbelief is everywhere under pressure, and juxtaposed with Barry's determination to face history. A group of Oglala Sioux stalk Thomas's company for miles across the Missouri Breaks, terrifying them and then shocking them with a sudden display of compassionate hospitality; but a brief period of co-existence yields to more bloodshed, to raped women and children snatched or left dead. In the years immediately before the civil war, America is shown as a country defined by lawlessness, ambition and plasticity; afterwards, it seems more hopelessly fractured, haunted by what has befallen it. During one of the many journeys the characters make across state lines, Thomas, John and Winona meet a Shawnee Indian, impoverished and fishing for mussels. He is unable to speak to Winona because they don't share a common language; they are both not where they are supposed to be. Thomas summarises the mournful occasion accurately: "Just an old widower Indian man by a river whose name we didn't know." This McNulty adventure is experimental and breathtakingly exciting The image of a country populated by spectral figures, devastated by conflicts that leave men "making the noises of ill-butchered cattle", their limbs hanging by a thread, their bodies emaciated and withered, is in sharp contrast with the landscape that inspires awe in both Thomas and Barry, and which seems to demand an equal grandeur in the observer: "A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved." Numerous other questions of identity flit through the novel. The emigrant Thomas rarely sounds exactly Irish, though the odd word bubbles up: "hames", as in making a hames, or a mess, of something, or "frocken", a small berry found on Irish mountainsides, gathered up and sold for dye. He is ambivalent about his compatriots, at the least, but his ambivalence itself centres on duality: "Don't tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity. He may be an angel in the clothes of a devil or a devil in the clothes of an angel but either way you're talking to two when you talk to one Irishman." Thomas's journey towards womanhood is equally alive to the idea of multitude, as what could be seen as his femininity -- largely his desire to dress as a woman and his maternal feelings for Winona -- is set apart from his stereotypically masculine capacity for war, in part derived from his sense of loyalty to his fellow soldiers. His striking description of a brutal reprisal against an Indian incursion presents an image of entrancement, of near dissociation: "We work in our lather of strange sorrow, but utterly revengeful, fiercely so, soldiers of intentful termination, of total annihilation." Days Without End is a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences are so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on. In its pages, Barry conjures a world in miniature, inward, quiet, sacred; and a world of spaces and borders so distant they can barely be imagined. Taken as a whole, his McNulty adventure is experimental, self-renewing, breathtakingly exciting. It is probably not ended yet. - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
A lively, richly detailed story of one slice of the Irish immigrant experience in America.Orphaned in the famine"all that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost there was nothing left in old Ireland"Thomas McNulty is fresh off the boat in the U.S. when he finds himself wearing blue, packed off to the West to fight Indians. He's fortunate to have a friend in young John Cole, of a loving if potentially lethal bent. Other of his soldier friends are to varying degrees bloodthirsty, psychotic, or crazy brave, and they work evil on every Indian encampment they find until, sickened by it all, the two soldiers find themselves caring for a young Sioux girl they call Winona. It is perfectly in keeping with McNulty's dark view of a world in which people are angels and devils in equal measure: "I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but they're both the same," he reflects, "they both have an awful fire burning inside them, like they were just the carapace of a furnace." Protecting Winona means putting themselves in the path of their comrades, those among whom they have fought from one end of the country to the other against Indians and secessionists. Extending the McNulty saga from books such as The Temporary Gentleman (2014) and The Secret Scripture (2008), Barry writes with a gloomy gloriousness: everyone that crosses his pages is in mortal danger, but there's an elegant beauty even in the most fraught moments ("By Jesus he just drives the knife into the chief's side"). The story is full of casual, spectacular violence, but none of it gratuitous, and with a fine closing moral: everyone will try to kill you in America, but those who don't are your friends, and, as Thomas says, "the ones that don't try to rob me will feed me." A pleasure for fans of Barry and his McNulty stories and a contribution not just to Irish literature in English, but also the literature of the American West. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
An unlikely love story between Irish immigrant Thomas McNulty and his younger friend John Cole, this new work is set on the American frontier in the mid 1800s, and its depth and beauty bring to mind the great prairie novels of Willa Cather. Thomas and John meet when they join the army together in 1851, and they soon are sent to fight Native Americans in Missouri. During the course of the novel, they witness massacres, participate in grisly Civil War battles, and end up adopting an orphaned Native girl as their daughter. Thomas is the narrator, and his voice sings from the page in an appealing blend of gritty vernacular, unschooled syntax, and rough-hewn poetry as he bears witness to the awesome beauty of the American landscape and the savagery in the hearts of men. Barry, twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (A Long Long Way; The Secret Scripture), offers a meditation on the nature of what it means to be an American, and his conclusions are both complex and fearless. Verdict A beautifully realized historical novel; enthusiastically recommended for all fans of literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, -Manchester Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.