Review: Days Without End

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Queer Frontier Picaresque

In critical theory, “queer” has a technical meaning. That is, it’s the conscious effort of looking at a system defined by a binary opposition and asserting there is either a middle ground or an alternative to the two extremes. If “queer” originally meant someone who was neither entirely “male” or “female,” someone whose sexuality didn’t align with what was understood to be the norm, it has become a sometime badge of honor and a way of critiquing certain forms of knowledge.

In this peculiar novel, our narrator and protagonist, Thomas McNulty, sees the world through just such a queer lens. He rejects commonplace binaries and takes the world as it comes. As a young man – in a scene that’s both funny and warm – he and his best friend, John Cole, find work dressing as women and dancing with lonely miners in the American West of the 1850s. Neither man is troubled to be an object of desire for other men, and Thomas develops a taste for it, ultimately often preferring women’s clothes to men’s.

Then, when they “fall in love” before long, it’s almost an afterthought to hear they’re having sex. This is a novel set before there’s really a modern conception of homosexuality, so Thomas and John don’t have a template to follow. They’re drawn to each other, and that’s enough.

Eventually, they join the army together and fight first in the Native-American wars and then in the Civil War.

Throughout, Thomas challenges what we think we know about essential binaries. War and peace blur into a constant march/struggle/time with other men. That’s true as well with American/Irish, husband/wife, Native-American/American, war/slaughter, slaughter/self-defense, and manifest destiny/live-and-let-live. Where another narrator might comment on the perpetual strangeness of his experiences, Thomas takes it all as it comes…though he does favor that word, “queer,” in much of what does pass for analysis.

The first half of this is extraordinary, and I thought for a while it marked a peculiar back-to-back Barry victory for me since I had so recently read Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier (so far my pick for novel of the year). Like a lot of picaresques, though, it has some trouble sustaining its momentum. For instance, I love the casual way Thomas describes the early battles, but this loses a little when those fighting descriptions get longer. The weirdness of Thomas’s perspective – the way he so often notices things others don’t and, conversely, can’t see things others take for granted – gets tempered.

[SPOILERS:] It’s moving when the two men adopt a Native-American girl, protecting her in part because neither sees her as a potential sexual object – but it starts to venture into cliché when she turns out to be the niece of a Plains chief who’s threatening war unless she’s returned. It’s further cliché when, after she’s shot, it turns out she’s saved by the bullet’s striking the gold coins sewn into the bodice of her dress.

[FINAL SPOILER:] The end redeems some that, though. It takes a great deal of slaughter of Native-Americans, and Thomas’s killing one of his closest friends, and possibly another of their friends murdering on his behalf, for Thomas to return to their small homestead unharmed and free of legal troubles. In that space, Thomas somehow loses the capacity to grieve. He seems strangely unaffected by what he’s been through, and that “queer” perspective returns, leaving the novel subversively undermining the sense of the nobility of the frontier experience.

I’m still not sure the whole would be great except for Barry’s lyric, often gorgeous prose. Just a few examples:

On the extreme heat of the West, “You could arrest sunlight for murder out on the plains.”

“It’s a hard task to make something out of nothing, as even God can attest.”

“We have our store of days, and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

When one character, who’s been active in slaughtering Native-Americans, later marries a Native woman, “I guess love laughs at history a little.”

And, maybe my favorite, “His skin is made of the aftermath of smiles.”

So, yes, there is a lot to admire here. I understand Barry has other novels dealing with the extended McNulty family, and I’m excited to try some more of them. This doesn’t quite rise to the level of the best of my old favorite William Kennedy, but I get a vague sense that there might be something reminiscent of that other masterful chronicle of Irish-America.


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