sebastian barry days without end summary

The soaring, resilient, witty, hopeful voice of Thomas McNulty keeps the pageant gloriously aloft. John Cole is a beautiful, wise man in the background, but little more, and the romance is so idyllic as to be a fantasy. Yet it is also a picaresque romp, full of heart-in-the-mouth tensions, hairbreadth escapes, unlikely coincidences, plot revolutions by the yard. None of the numerous horrors are sanitised, men do abominable things, fine men have lifelong regrets. The novel itself is one great contradiction. A major, a 'good man' in John Coles' estimation, goes on a massacring spree when his wife and daughter are killed by the Sioux.Īmbivalence is thorough going. Rather more sharply Thomas also reports, 'Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.' Good and evil are never sequestered entities. The one-time vaudeville artist, on a trek down country, gives a forward wave to West Side Story – 'The ones that don't try to rob me will feed me. Naturally enough he's much given to aphorisms, not all of them profound, but never not in character. It's both beauty and terror: 'vines climb into the halted trees and frost wraps round their limbs till you think the woods be full of icy snakes'.

He does landscape descriptions that any artist would be proud to claim – and they're never without ambivalence. The range of Thomas' folksy lingo is limitless. Thomas' only literary references are to the Bible, but they are turned wonderfully upside down when he (in drag) and John Cole and little Winona shoot from his horse a ruffian who has tried to rob and murder them, the villain 'stares like he been assaulted by the Holy Family'. Kind of an angel sent to me in the guise of a fat turnkey smelling of shit and onions.' Something so old is perpetual young.' He describes a warder, Pleasant Hazelwood, looking after him in a condemned cell, 'Kind old bugger and him as ugly as a moose. 'The old Mississippi is a temperate girl most times and her skin is soft and even. But the union of opposites is more comprehensive than that.įor one thing Thomas, for all his non-existent education, is a lyrical philosopher, and for another his major theme is the paradox of the world. On a straightforward level these range from the drag act, and some blackface work as well, to one Lige (Elijah) Magan, a Tennessee man in the Union army. It's a world of pervasive anomalies and contradictions. And Thomas and John Cole adopt and love and go through countless tribulations for a little Sioux girl they name Winona – whose parents they have killed. Dressed and beautified as a woman, he and John Cole have worked a romantic act that has left the tough miners of Grand Rapids subdued with tender desire. Yet his life has also had supremely rosy interludes and continuities.

Sebastian barry days without end summary