4 Stars
This novel
won its author an unprecedented second Costa Book of the Year award. I certainly understand why.
The
narrator, Thomas McNulty, recalls the days of his youth when “Time was not
something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something
that would go on forever . . . the days without end of my life.” After losing his family in Ireland because of
the potato famine, he makes his way to America where he meets John Cole. The two of them, “wood-shavings in a rough
world,” make their way together in that world by being saloon entertainers before
joining the U.S. cavalry to fight Indians and then joining the Union Army to
fight Confederate rebels.
The book
examines a number of issues, including friendship, love, and family. Thomas has lost his family in Ireland and
becomes one of what he calls, “Nothing people”:
“We were a plague. We were only
rats of people.” When he meets John,
Thomas changes: “First time I felt a
human person again.” Thomas declares, “John Cole was my first friend in America
and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter” and soon “John Cole
was my love, all my love.” Together they
persevere through life’s travails and as a couple adopt a young Sioux girl whom
they name Winona. The three of them form
a “Holy Family” which Thomas will do anything to protect. It is this love and this family that give
Thomas hope and sustain him.
A major
theme of the book is the paradox of the world.
Almost everyone and everything possesses contrasting dualities. There is always a “sense of two worlds
rubbing up.” At the beginning, Thomas describes
the Irish: “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.
He can’t help you enough and he can’t double-cross you deep enough ever
either. An Irish trooper is the bravest
man in the field and the most cowardly. I don’t know what it is. I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but
they’re both the same . . . I was never no different neither.” And it is not just the Irish. The Indians fight savagely but leave food for
starving soldiers. A major in the
cavalry strives for compromise with the Indians yet also leads a vicious
assault on an Indian village. That major
has twin daughters: “Hephzibah was the
black-haired girl and the fair one was Angel.”
Winona is a Sioux but after living with whites, Thomas asks, “What is
she now? Plucked all two ways . . . ” As teenagers, John and Thomas perform in drag
for miners who are described as liking “rough food, rough whisky, rough nights”
but they are also “gentlemen of the frontier” who when dancing with the boys “were
that pleasing d’Artagnan in the old romances.”
Army life is full of brutality yet Thomas says “army was a good life”;
it was bloody but full of camaraderie.
Even nature
is full of contradictions: “The old
Mississippi is a temperate girl most times and her skin is soft and even. Something so old is perpetual young.” And even the beauty of nature has threat in
it: “Vines climb into the halted trees
and frost wraps round their limbs till you think the woods be full of icy
snakes.” He describes seeing a country “whose
beauty penetrates our bones. I say
beauty and I mean beauty,” but then follows up with, “Oftentimes in American
you could go stark mad from the ugliness of things.”
Of course
Thomas is the best example of duality.
He is a man who dresses as a woman:
“I am easy as a woman, taut as a man.
All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake
with the same. I don’t foresee no time
where this ain’t true no more. Maybe I
was born a man and growing into a woman.”
Thomas explores gender fluidity; he is fascinated when in an Indian
encampment he “spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery
of squaws. . . . 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.”
Considering
all that the men experience, it is not surprising that Thomas thinks, “No such
item as a virtuous people.” He argues, “They
say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived
knows that’s damned lies.” When he sees
freed blacks working and not looking like slaves, he is happy, concluding “this
looks like to be better,” but then he adds, “We ain’t lingering to find out the
weevils and the bad worms in these new visions.” Nonetheless, “Every life has its days of
happiness despite the ugly Fates.” Though
it may seem “Life wants you to go down and suffer” and “The world don’t care
much, it just don’t mind much,” sometimes it is possible to “rob from injustice
a shard of love.” And “All that stint of
daily life we sometimes spit on like it was something waste. But it all there is and in it is enough. I do believe so.”
The language
is very poetic and that sometimes strains the reader’s credulity. Would a man such as Thomas be capable of such
wonderful turns of phrase? After one
particularly brutal attack on Indians, Thomas muses about the settlers who are
invading Indian lands: “This was the
section of humanity favoured in that place, the Indians had no place no more
there. Their tickets of passage were
rescinded and the bailiffs of God had took back the paper for their souls. I did feel a seeping tincture of sadness for
them. I did feel some strange toiling
seeping sadness for them.” The
combination of poetry and ungrammatical expressions is sometimes jarring, but that
duality is undoubtedly intentional.
I can see
the book being made into a sweeping, epic movie. It has ferocious battles, plot twists, hairbreadth
escapes, and tests of endurance against heat, cold, and starvation. There are several instances where suspense is
ratcheted up to an extreme. And there’s
a story about friendship, loyalty, and love.
Readers
should be forewarned that some suspension of disbelief is required. For example, there’s a marriage that is
totally anachronistic, and the fortuitous arrival of a former comrade-in-arms in
the midst of a gunfight is just too coincidental. They should also be warned that the violence
is graphic; battles and suffering are described with realistic brutality.
I loved The Secret Scripture, the other novel
that won Sebastian Barry the Costa Book of the Year award. This one is as deserving.
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