But his sentence is commuted and he gets hard labour, noting ironically that “in the time of the hunger in Sligo a lot of men did that work, to feed their families”.īarry has rarely written more affectingly than in these closing pages. When he is freed, his past catches up with him and he faces execution for desertion. In the fog of war McNulty gets captured by some Confederate rebels. His account of the civil war is impressionistic and brilliantly executed. Barry’s answer to those who might challenge its verisimilitude is simple: “I guess love laughs at history a little.” Their strange life as a threesome on the prairie becomes the emotional heart of Days Without End. The upshot of savage retribution on both sides is that Cole and McNulty acquire a native American “daughter” named Winona. The boys’ unit gets caught up in war crimes. Soon they enlist in the US army together and find themselves in a vicious war against the Sioux, in particular the ferocious chief, Caught-His-Horse-First. Both are just boys in search of some excitement and a living wage. Another parallel: the driving of the Native American tribes into internal exile mirrors the fate of many Irish during the famine.Īppropriately for a playwright, Barry begins with McNulty and Cole on stage, performing a cross-dressing routine for the miners of Daggsville. Below the waterline, the novelist also wants to explore the way in which the dispossessed Irish who settled out west visited upon the Native American all the cruelties they had suffered at the hands of the British. Barry’s achievement is to do this, in the first person, in a way that’s neither implausible nor mawkish.Ī Union infantryman in uniform, carrying a large rifle and bayonet, during the American civil war. While he compiles his recollections, he’s also celebrating his discreet passion for another man, Cole. McNulty is writing in old age, looking back over 50 years, “and wondering where the years went”.
Days Without End is at once an affecting love story, and a nostalgic celebration of a long life.
You could say that this is a western, but like the best of the genre, its vision fuses old and new: warfare, homecoming, gender politics, coming of age and romance. He transforms the blood-red landscape of middle America into the embodiment of the American myth – violent, transgressive, passionate, timeless and a little bit mad – a place that becomes both the subject of song and the song itself. The American west of McNulty’s superb narration owes something to Twain, Whitman, Crane, and even Cormac McCarthy, but Barry is not content merely to pay homage to these masters.
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