Days Without End - Sebastian Barry

In 'Days Without End', Sebastian Barry presents us with Thomas McNulty, looking back as old man, who flees to Canada in mid 19th century and then America to escape the Great Famine in Ireland . In the US, Thomas is many things, 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. A brutal raid on an Indian settlement follows, there is an orphanage on fire – the transformative effect of such destruction on its participants is memorably captured. There are increasingly complex interactions with indigenous communities, the development of Thomas and John’s relationship and sexual attraction, Thomas albeit briefly and in clandestine fashion, Thomasina with John act as parents to a Sioux child, Winona, who has been wrested from her family.

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 from 1861 to 1865, America is shown as a country defined by lawlessness, ambition and plasticity; afterwards, it seems more hopelessly fractured, haunted by what has befallen it. What Tom has observed among the Sioux is that men can choose to dress as squaws at home but, in battle, still be warriors. This thought becomes his guide. He feels at home in a dress but, as a soldier, follows orders even when they are treacherous, learning that there are good men and bad on any side. 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's 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.

The novel was awarded the Costa Book Award 2016.The judges of the prize called it “A miracle of a book – both epic and intimate – that manages to create spaces for love and safety in the noise and chaos of history.”

Thomas states how “We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.” While the meaning of conflicts being fought in the battlefields remains ambiguous for Thomas, the conviction he and John feel about their desire and love for each other is certain. Tom, John and Winona survive battlefields and atrocities, trek across America’s great plains into the agonised, villainous aftermath of the war between the states. Barry makes us understand how. Grief may freeze the heart, the body be tested to extremes, but where there’s life there’s hope, and love is what makes life worth living,

The book indeed is a mix of humor and horror, blunt, with the main characters living in frontier country - writing on the beauty of landscape is a masterpiece, not just the landscape but the atmosphere as well like crossing the plane in winter - frost bites, vs. absolutely brutal slaughter of native Americans. It is completely different from romanticist Gone with the wind, though battle scenes are common, this is implicitly about ethics of war, and what it is to be a soldier. People slaughtering women and children.

There is no sense or saying what is right or wrong - author leaves it to the readers to understand and decide.

Moral complexity is enormous. ..It hurts just knowing War continues in our world.

“Killing hurts the heart, and soils the soul”.