Sebastian Barry, _Days Without End_

THIS NOVEL IS a bit of a knuckleball. In the first place, it is an historical novel set in the USA of the 19th century, but Barry himself is Irish--don't they have enough 19th century themselves to write about?  (Tóibín's Brooklyn is a precedent, I suppose).

The narrator and principal character, Thomas McNulty, is Irish, a Famine survivor who has managed to get to the United States; Thomas is also gay, and furthermore an occasional cross-dresser. He and his best friend-lover-partner John Cole end up in the army, serving both in the Civil War and in the Indian Wars, the latter (and their brutality) getting a large swathe of the narrative.

So--the other swerve of the knuckleball--I kept expecting that the plot was going to turn on Thomas's being Irish, gay, and an occasional cross-dresser. He and John Cole were going to be discovered, I assumed, persecuted and punished in some way...but nothing of the sort happens. In fact, for the first two-thirds of the novel, the narration is virtually a chronicle, soldiers crossing the prairie, the occasional atrocity, but nothing particularly plot-like emerging at all.

Which turns out to be okay, because Thomas is good company. He is uneducated, his narration not always grammatical, but even so his voice has a lyricism, a homemade eloquence, even a kind of who-knows-how-acquired erudition. Some of the folks in our book club did not quite buy this--that someone who thought the past tense of "know" was "knowed" would nonetheless have in his quiver vocabulary like "conflagration" and "maelstrom" and a few Shakespearean allusions. But, for me, it was as credible as the voice of Ned Kelly in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. There was something Irish about it, the kind of elevation a bright kid could have picked up from sermons or political oratory, mixed with the touch of linguistic music that is virtually a national birthright.

The last third of the novel is brisk, as we do suddenly get plenty of plot, about the feud between Major Neale and the Sioux chieftain Caught-His-Horse-First, kidnapped daughters, rescued daughters, courts martial, a certain amount of shoot-'em-up. All pretty exciting, but what I will remember best is Thomas's voice.