Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” was a bit reminiscent to me of the strange travels in “News of the World” with writing that reminded me of my grandfather’s reading to me of Walt Whitman. Not that I haven’t read Whitman on my own, but I only hear it anymore in my grandfather’s voice.
There’s a lovely, if somber, touch to the writing, with prose that sings the song of every man.
“We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.”
This story is narrated by a young Thomas McNulty, a youth who fled Ireland during the time of the Great Famine, came to America, and after many years surviving as a dancer in a saloon along with his then new-found friend John Cole, they volunteered and joined the Army when he was seventeen, or thereabouts, in Missouri.
”If you had all your limbs they took you. If you were a one-eyed boy they might take you too even so. The only pay worse than the worst pay in America was army pay.”
“ Yes, the army took me, I’m proud to say. Thank God John Cole was my first friend in America and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter. He was with me nearly all through this exceeding surprising Yankee sort of life which was good going in every way. No more than a boy like me but even at sixteen years old he looked like a man right enough. I first saw him when he was fourteen or so, very different. That’s what the saloon owner said too.”
They go off, at first, to fight the Indian Wars against the Sioux and the Yurok, and then later, the Civil War. Between those two wars, they bring an eight year-old Sioux girl to live with them. A girl that Mrs. Neale, the Major’s wife, had been teaching, she had learned English and her letters and numbers, along with some cooking skills. Still, Mrs. Neale only agrees to allow this after Thomas assures her that they only want this girl for a servant and not for “their own solace,” and he promises to protect her as his own child. They call her Winona, and from thereon she is known as John Cole’s daughter in a legal sense, but in reality they view her as nothing less than their daughter.
” I guess it’s long ago now. Seems to sit right up in front of my eyes just now though.”
Time. The passage of time is one of the details of life he often reflects on.
”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.”
Nature is another object of his reflections. Life in the war and after, the endless nights of sleeping in cold so bitter and deep it could take your life. Days and nights so hot you could barely breathe. The land. The sky viewed as if it were a painting.
”Now in these different districts, the sun came up that bit earlier, more eagerly, more like the baker putting fire into his bread oven, in the small hours, so the women in the town would have bread bright early. Lord, that sun rose regular and sere, he didn’t care who saw him, naked and round and white. Then the rains came walking over the land, as exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig. Making the grass seeds drunk with ambition. Then the sun pouring in after the rain, and the wide endless prairie steaming, a vast and endless vista of white steam rising, and the flocks of birds wheeling and turning, a million birds to one cloud, we’d a needed a blunderbuss to harvest them, small black fleet wondrous birds.”
Life, what comprises a life at the end of it, the things we recall when stripped down to the days when our breaths can be counted.
”A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
War is brutal, gloomy, dark and disturbing, and yet this book couldn’t be more poetic, more powerful, more remarkable, more captivating, more of a pleasure to read, or just plain lovelier.
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Days Without End: A Novel
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One of the finest books I’ve ever read
Reviewed in France on June 24, 2023
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