It is 1851 in Missouri. A Sligo boy decked out in the finest of women’s silks and lace dances with his lover, John Cole, on a Daggsville stage. Their beauty is breathtaking. Lonesome miners pine for them, vie for their favours, offer gold and marriage. This is Thomas McNulty. His forebears are Famine ghosts on a Sligo quayside. The United States offers a world never seen before, a burlesque of exploration and conquest, of lost lives and sublime love.
Puberty catches up with McNulty and Cole. They quit the stage and sign up to the US army.
From the start the enterprise is based in blood. That’s no surprise to McNulty. The stench of Famine graves and of the coffin ship hangs around him. When his troop stumbles into a group of Native Americans in the dark they slaughter all – and find they have killed women and children. The townspeople fete them for what they have done. The young soldier ponders the massacre, gives the flown souls their due.
McNulty narrates. The making of a new world demands a new language, and McNulty has the tools for it. It is a detached, lyric voice. Wonder is never far away, whether that wonder is directed at inhumanity or at the physical beauty of his lover. Connacht vernacular gives way to American idiom, which in turn gives way to a voice that seems called from McNulty by the land itself. You’d expect no less of Sebastian Barry. The glory is always in the language.
McNulty’s troop is commanded by Maj Neale. He is a decent man, but the Indian wars are no place for decency. Neale strives for accommodation, compromise. His wife and children come west with him. Mrs Neale is a nurturing presence. But the hand of genocide will not be stayed.
Such matter can only be epic. The landscape demands it. But Barry is always alert to intimacy.
This is not Cormac McCarthy's determinist west, the void into which morality empties, although it comes close to it at times, and Barry doesn't turn his face away. McNulty expects nothing of the world save what can be eked out in the unguarded moments. Cole is everything to him. The attachment between the two men is profound yet, in their own eyes, commonplace. It finds a home in the indigenous idea of berdache, or "two-spirit". McNulty's sexual being is less androgyny than the summoning of some other gender from within, a spiritual being elevated above others.
Loneliness
Its an eminence from which he observes the terrible loneliness of men, such as Neale, who lean towards nobility and those morally adrift in the charnel verities of the old west. There is the murderously unknowing Starling Carlton, who breaches a parlay with terrible consequences; the warrior Caught-His-Horse-First, who stands as foe and rebuke to the white man, bargaining while knowing that he games with his own death; and sundry poets, fighters, lovers, impresarios. McNulty charts the melancholy longings of miners who have come too far from home, the vile appetites of an unleashed militia.
Women are swept away: slaughtered, bargained over, taken in vengeance. The urbane Mrs Neale will not be spared; nor will any of the native women. If any higher purpose is involved it is hard to see, and McNulty isn’t looking for it. He is an opportunist in matters of the heart. If love is to survive it has to be makeshift, outside of convention, anchored in good intentions. When Caught-His-Horse- First’s daughter Winona is cast adrift McNulty and Cole seize the chance of gathering a family to themselves.
The terror and awe of empire coming into being do not spare McNulty and Cole. They are ordered north into the battles of the American Civil War: Edwards Landing, Andersonville.
The First Nations brave and the soldier knew each other on the elemental level of native and usurper. When Neale’s men are lost in the wilderness, and starving, they are fed by their enemies, the Oglala braves. There are boundaries even in hatred, and a spiritual price to be paid when codes are breached. The civil war is savagery of a different order. When the industrial clangour of the guns falls silent the prisoners are left to starve or die from disease. Nobody is minding these souls.
McNulty accepts the proposition that, for many, the only bounty on offer in this strange country is death. He sees the worst in others but is slow to judge. Maj Neale is trapped in high-mindedness. The place he has entered allows two choices: to discard the moral centre or to have it taken from you. When all that is precious to him is lost, his values desert him. Caught-His-Horse-First has stayed with the game, his pain a mirror of Neale’s, while still standing surety for his people, a custodian of dark propriety. Now he and his people are betrayed, subsumed in a slurry of blood, an orgy of ghastly souvenir-taking.
In the end the blood-red past will be ordered, brought to heel. The wild-eyed men who saw themselves as carriers of civilisation are broken, their task done. Winona has been saved from the slaughter, but in saving her McNulty has broken the codes of his own kind and is bound to pay.
There is a majestic rhythm to Barry’s prose, deep craft in the shaping of the novel, the impetus of events carrying us through at pace, the writer, like McNulty himself, nimble, ahead of events, with long paragraphs ballasting the narrator’s linguistic fire.
McNulty describes Maj Neale as a man who strove for justice, and “as he had a properly low opinion of man in the main he could allow a great margin of leeway when it was indicated”.
Sebastian Barry won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year award for the second time with this novel. He is the most humane of writers. The leeway is always generous; beauty is mined to its last redemptive glint. Like McNulty, the voice is humorous, compassionate, true. It is his glory as a writer. It is the stern, glorious music of a great novel.
Eoin McNamee is the author of the Blue trilogy
