His account of a massacre at a smoke-filled encampment, in which they “saw the shapes of Indians and stabbed them with our bayonets… I stabbed and stabbed”, has a horrific coda in which he realises they have indiscriminately attacked the hiding place of women and children. However, he never forgets the brutal way in which Native Americans were forced into submission. Written in the kind of old, drawling American dialect so redolent of that period – “It was in the time of noisy weather that the first trouble came… we rode forth to meet it” – Barry constructs fantastically widescreen depictions of life on the Oregon Trail, tapping directly into the folklore of the establishment of the United States. He stows away on a boat to North America and becomes a soldier, complicit in the blood and horror of the battles with the Sioux in the Indian wars of the mid-19th century. In his latest, Days Without End, the connection to the McNultys is Thomas, an ancestor who is orphaned during Ireland's Great Famine. Many of his novels are loosely linked to an Irish family, the McNultys, with vulnerable characters battling displacement, tragedy and circumstance.īut there is a certain endurance to them, too – an inherent willingness to see good in the world. Sebastian Barry has an uncanny knack for capturing a certain kind of Irishness.
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