I was basking in that particular, inviolate glow known only to the reader who has reached the end of an absorbing novel �" in this case Sebastian Barry's Days without End (Viking) �" when I learned, with a start, that it was St. Patrick's Day. Barry's narrator/protagonist, Thomas McNulty, is a young Irishman come to America to escape the Potato Famine, and Irishness follows him everywhere.
With no political heavy-handedness whatsoever, Barry populates his panoramic novel with refugees of all kinds seeking a better life on the vast, opening American frontier, alongside and not infrequently in conflict �" and often open combat �" with Native Americans, the "other side" in the Civil War (with Irish immigrants fighting in both armies) and the black people Ben Carson recently reimagined as migrants seeking a better life here. But by making all of his characters rounded, full-blooded human beings, he has accomplished that thing �" inclusion, I think we call it now �" that art, particularly fiction, does best.
The place he wouldn't have had to go, but has gone credibly and appreciatively, is the inclusion of gays, not just as players among the others but as the novel's two main characters, McNulty and "Handsome" John Cole, whose parentless past is sufficiently vague that he knows only that his ethnicity is partly Native American. That Barry has created this pair in part as a personal response to his own son's having come out to him is a testament to the craft that has twice short-listed him for the Man Booker Award and won him the Costa Novel Award for this book.
The circumstances of the boys' meeting are unromantic; they discover each other under a wagon while scavenging for food. But Barry boldly makes it love at first sight for both, a lasting relationship that at a particularly unlikely juncture includes their wedding ceremony, pre-Supreme Court by well more than a century. In a feat of higher narrative daring, Barry makes the men the loving "fathers" for a Sioux girl whose family they obediently if reluctantly help slaughter. Somehow that works, too, for the three characters and for the reader.
Barry is walking a knife's edge throughout, sentimentality threatening to swallow him up and incline gay readers in 2017 to disgorge his tale. In a book that is a catalog of dire circumstances at a Homeric level, these boys are the light, for each other and the reader frequently recoiling from their unrelieved hardships.
There is none of the naked acrobatics of gay sex, but there is love and devotion, all the more plausible because, being always destitute and more often than not engaged in grisly wars, they're hardly surrounded by temptation. Here's the sex bit, while they are in the army: "And then we quietly fucked and then we slept." It strikes with the suggestive subtlety found in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.
Still, Barry could not have brought it off without an element of other-sexuality rendered with authenticity and, critically, humor. The first work the inseparable pair finds is dressing up as girls to dance in a saloon patronized by sex-starved miners, a situation Barry realizes with bravado. What grounds it is Thomas' immediate recognition that wearing a dress suits him fine. "Funny how as soon as we hove into those dresses everything changed. I never felt so contented in my life. I was a new man now, a new girl. I was freed. I felt dainty, strong and perfected."
The power of it resurfaces in one of the book's most remarkable passages, when the men are again working as entertainers, Thomas in drag, in a vaudeville show for roughnecks. After some uneasy moments wondering what they were seeing, "The crowd beyond the curtains now are clapping, hooting, stamping. There is a craziness in it all that betokens a kind of delicious freedom. They seen a flickering picture of beauty. All day they've labored, but for a minute they loved a woman that isn't a real woman but that ain't the point. There was love in Mr. Titus Noone's hall for a crazy foggy moment. There were love imperishable for a foggy moment."
Years of heavy soldiering later, Thomas reflects, "Maybe in my deepest soul I believe my own fakery [here, passing as a woman for safety in transit]. I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days. Just a thing that's in you and you can't gainsay. I am easy as a woman, taut as a man."
Such leavening sweetness is offset by long passages recounting war, with its banal violence and bodily horrors. The writing is just shy of the nearly pornographic violence of Corman McCarthy's Border Trilogy , without quite tipping into full Mel Gibson-movie obscenity. And throughout, hunger of a rib-cage-rattling sort is described with an insistence to make you want to run out for �" this St. Patrick's Day, I guess, a McDonalds. "Hunger takes away what you are," Barry declares soberly.
But the writing is unflaggingly vital; sentence after sentence fragment leaps out with surprises. "Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars." It's starry walking with them.