Winona is clever and John has taught her how to read and write she’s working for lawyer Briscoe, who is committed to reconstruction and justice for all, at a time when postwar hopes of a new south are beginning to crumble and the defeated Confederates are agitating, stirring racial violence. It is Winona who narrates A Thousand Moons, picking up the story when she is becoming a young woman and Thomas and John aren’t good-looking boys any longer, but hardworking men beginning to turn grey – though Thomas still puts on a dress for special occasions. Even the wicked and violent men in his novels, in fact, won’t lie down neatly inside their category description.
Oddly assorted families, in which race and gender and role are all mixed up, are at the heart of Barry’s ideal. There they compose an oddly assorted family, including ex-slaves Rosalee Bouguereau and her brother Tennyson, and Thomas and John’s adopted daughter, Winona, a Native American orphan whose real name, she tells us, is Ojinjintka, which means “rose” in the Lakota language. At the end of that novel Thomas and John, soldiers and cross-dressers and a loving couple, have settled down on Lige Magan’s tobacco farm outside Paris, a small town in West Tennessee. In A Thousand Moons we’re reunited with Thomas McNulty and John Cole from his last book, the magnificent Costa-winning Days Without End, which was set against the American Indian wars and civil war. In A Long Long Way, set in the first world war, because Willie Dunne serves in the British army, he is seen as a traitor by some in Ireland he is later caught up fighting the rebels in the Easter Rising. In The Secret Scripture Roseanne McNulty approaches her 100th birthday in a Roscommon psychiatric hospital in The Temporary Gentleman Jack McNulty makes a life for himself in colonial and postcolonial Ghana. His ambitious and Balzacian novel-project – which never feels programmatic, each book seeming to grow organically to become part of the whole – has assembled over time a richly significant map of the Irish diaspora, and of the ways Irish lives have intersected with global history, alongside the drama of their history unfolding at home. Barry is a poet and playwright as well as a novelist, and he is Ireland’s second laureate for fiction, following Anne Enright. S ebastian Barry’s new novel extends again the great web of story and history he has been weaving for years now out of the fictional Dunne and McNulty tribes, picking up fragments of anecdote and character from the past of his own family, developing and transforming them.
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