Another redemptive treatise from the laureate of empathy
THIS is a sequel to Sebastian Barry’s magnificent and hallucinatory Days Without End, a novel which traces the plight of Irishman Thomas McNulty during the Indian Wars and the American Civil War. The narrator is Winona, a young Native American orphan adopted by McNulty and his partner John Cole. It’s now the 1870s and we’re in Tennessee. The war is over, but that does not mean there is peace.
Barry has created a blended family with Winona — her Lakota name is Ojinjintk — at its centre. The phantasmagoria includes her Polish suitor Jas Jonski, her employer ‘the lawyer Briscoe’ (Winona “never heard him referred to by any other handle”), as well as a host of other colourful and larger-than-life characters. When Winona is attacked, the novel takes off in the style of the revenge tragedy.
Reading this lyrical treatise of violence, war and tenderness, I could not help think of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
The desperate hopelessness of that Civil War precursor is mirrored in Barry’s work, but with one significant difference: Barry’s writing is redemptive; as an author he looks for the best in people, and he very often finds it. He is the light to McCarthy’s darkness.
Barry is the Laureate for Irish Fiction, but he is also the laureate of empathy. He’s for the underdog, the marginalised, or what Frank O’Connor once called “the lonely voice”.
He tackles the dominant narratives of our times, and complicates them. Barry presents us with a counter-narrative. When it comes to history, that is sometimes welcome and often necessary. Besides, who doesn’t like a good Western?
In True Grit, Charles Portis created a voice so memorable it re-wrote the whole genre of the Western. The church-going elderly spinster Mattie Ross and her memories of herself as a 14-year-old girl mashed the genre into something we now call the revisionist or post-Western.
Barry’s A Thousand Moons also falls into this category. It may not have the former’s irony, but it does have the moral ambiguity, and it also has a memorable voice-driven and sympathetic protagonist in Winona, who has inherited her adopted father’s Irish patter.
While debates about cultural appropriation are doing the rounds, thanks to Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, it’s worth remembering that the debate is not new.
When William Styron wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner, he was lambasted for assuming the voice of an African American. His daughter Alexandra wrote recently in The Atlantic about her father’s arrogance, but also his “imperative stance as a serious artist”.
That is where I see Barry, and even though this is a historical novel, there is still something prescient in its narrative, something contemporary. Winona’s mother had a story called ‘The Fall’. Winona tells us “a great sickness had come to us, she said, a thousand moons ago”. Many die, inevitably. “A thousand moons ago was her deepest measure of time… for my mother, time was a kind of hoop or a circle.”
This notion of circular time chimes with Barry’s project, in the panoply of novels he is writing, one which takes in the Irish Civil War,
The Great War, The American Civil War, and a number of families, in particular the McNultys.
For all that, A Thousand Moons isa surprisingly quick read. Winona has a love interest in the inimitably named Peg. Their romance is not without its own cross-dressing. Nothing is what is seems.
There’s a stolen firearm called LUTHER, which Winona attempts to retrieve, and of course the assault at the centre of the novel. Whiskey has been supped, and Winona’s rights as a woman, and Native American, or ‘injun’ as it is sometimes put in the novel, make her less than a second-class citizen.
Winona goes as far as to say: “We ain’t even human people. We animals, that you can beat and harry and hurt as you please.”
There’s no denying the performative power of Barry’s writing; he is a poignant writer, never averse to risking the articulation of genuine sentiment, while avoiding the sentimental. It’s no surprise he is a playwright and poet.
The denouement in A Thousand Moons is heartbreaking, and elegiac. In a prayer-like appeal, Winona leaves us with words which address self-hood, identity, freedom and love. “That I had souls that loved me and hearts that watched over me was a truth self-evident to hold.” And that from the smithy of Barry’s imagination she could be talking to us right here, right now, is an extraordinary achievement.
“That the world was strange and lost was no argument. That there was no place to stand on the earth that was not perilous was just the news of every moment.”
How very sad, and beautiful, and true.