November Book of the Month

Days Without End – Sebastian Barry

This month we’ve chosen Sebastian Barry’s new book Days Without End. This powerful and gripping novel about duty and family, set against the American Indian and Civil Wars has been reviewed by Becky Hinshelwood.

FABER & FABER

‘Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on for ever, 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. And it is not like that now…’ After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Having fled terrible hardships they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and imperilled when a young Indian girl crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges, if only they can survive. Moving from the plains of the West to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America’s past, Days Without End is a novel never to be forgotten.

Buy your copy HERE for £10.23 (RRP:£17.99) + free UK delivery


Review By Becky Hinshelwood

With just a week to go until what is arguably the bleakest United States presidential election for generations, it seems timely to be reading Days Without End. Our narrator, Thomas McNulty relays his experiences during the years of Indian and American Civil wars and the echo of brutal and lawless battles between both Old and New World societies and Union and Confederate states is still present to this day in the tensions that permeate American gun law, politics and society.

I’ve got this theory that most personalities can be split into two groups based on the humanities; you’re either a Historian or a Geographer. I can lose hours of my life in one siting when I get caught up in a perpetual loop of Wikipedia links. I never knew I’d be so interested in the minor nobility of the late seventeenth century! My husband thinks that this is peculiar – he doesn’t understand because he is a Geographer and would no doubt relish the end papers of this hardback edition which depict an historical map of Unionist and Confederate states.

Having said that, I have struggled in the past with ‘war’ stories. Catch 22 is the only book to have beaten me and it’s probably telling that it had also beaten my mother before me. I struggle to engage with the type of language that often litters work which covers war. However, this is an aspect in which Days Without End is triumphant. Our narrator is an army man and speaks in the language of his peers – which takes a bit of getting used to, being structured as it is in a mish-mash of Irish and Colonial tones. His descriptions of unspeakably horrific acts that mark a war are hard to absorb, but at the same time Sebastian Barry has written the character with such simplicity and tenderness that I never struggled to engage with his tale.

Relationships and sense of identity are dealt with so gently, thoughtfully and without political nuance in this book. The most notable difference between the voice in this story and the one that we find in many war stories is the tenderness and humanity that prevails despite the atrocious events that take place. What is appealing within this book is the depiction of human interaction that transcends politics, prejudice and convention. McNulty is a man of contradictions; capable of brutal acts of war, a sense of honour and duty, and deep unconditional love. He is, in these things, both entirely unremarkable and utterly memorable.

Thomas McNulty is vulnerable in his transsexual identity; it is something that is both hidden and strangely accepted amongst the army men and wider communities. Our hotch-potch collection of characters come from all backgrounds – Irish, Native American, African, German, English and mixtures of the above. All are seemingly persecuted in their own ways, some more violently than others, but the important fact remains that in this story no one is ‘safe’. I feared for the beautiful and compassionate relationship that exists between our three central characters: Thomas, John Cole (always referred to by both names) and Winona (who is renamed but has no surname), delicate and fragile as it is in a violent and unpredictable world.

The building of America as reflected in the characters of this book led me to muse on the global media’s current preoccupation with nationality and the role that this is playing in the aforementioned presidential campaigns. Surely there is no such thing as a true ‘American’ and the same goes for any country actually. In fact, no one is really anything and this book left me with the rather comforting reflection that we all simply experience our own days without end alongside the souls that we encounter along the way until we do reach that inevitable end point. It is clear that we should all accept each other a bit more for our individuality and humanity. It’d be a start.