Sebastian Barry - Days Without End

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Truly excellent

Days Without End really is as good as everyone says it is.  I was a little sceptical but eventually tried it because so many people had said it was great – and it is.  Truly excellent.

This is the story of Thomas McNulty who left Ireland like so many others around 1850 because of "the hunger" to seek a new life in the New World.  Narrated by Thomas himself looking back in later years, it's a tale of hardship and survival and of life in the US Army before, during and after the Civil War.  It has important things to say about many things, including friendship, the companionship and sometimes divided loyalties of soldiers, the meaning of family and also a powerful, enduring love between two men.  It's brilliantly done; I found it utterly gripping and often profoundly moving.

What makes this so special for me is Thomas's voice, which is a wonderful mixture of the slightly rough, naïve and uneducated and also the evocatively poetic.  I'm no expert on the language of that time and place, but it rang absolutely true to me and I genuinely felt as though Thomas was sitting with me and telling his story.  He evokes the real feel of the Old West brilliantly, with all its hardships and some pleasures, and the terror, exultation and horror of battle is as well drawn as I've ever read.  Some is hard to read because of its content, but never because of the telling.  The appalling massacres of Native Americans and the terrible battles of the Civil War kept me absolutely riveted and often feeling wrung-out afterward from the intensity of them.  It's never overblown and often rather understated in a way, but utterly gripping and immensely powerful; I felt as though I was there at Thomas's shoulder, feeling all his complexity of emotion.

I marked lots of sentences and passages which I liked and which give a flavour of the book's style.  As a couple of brief examples: "Dark fields and troubled crops, the big sky growing melancholy with evening." Or of a Catholic army padre who is liked by men of all denominations, "A good heart carries across fences.  Fr Giovanni.  Small man wouldn't be much good for fighting but he good for tightening those screws that start to come loose on the engine of a man when he's facing God knows what."

Quite simply, this is a wonderfully involving read, superbly written; it is one of the best things I have read for some time and I cannot understand why it didn't at least make the Booker Shortlist.  Too enjoyably readable, perhaps?  Very warmly recommended.