mikerickson reviewed Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Review of 'Days Without End' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
There's many staggering about, clutching their wounds, crying out, but now the braves seem to have done their calculations and try to bring off the squaws and children towards the back of the village. Fire, fire, men, calls our sergeant, and we reload like lunatics and fire. Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Over and over, and over and over Death at his frantic task in the village, gathering souls. We work in our lather of strange sorrow, but utterly revengeful, fiercely so, soldiers of intentful termination, of total annihilation. Nothing less will slake our thirst. Nothing else will fill our hunger. As we fire, we laugh. As we fire, we cry out. As we fire, we weep.
There's a song by National Park Radio called 'These Great Plains' where the chorus goes:
And we wonder how the West was won
As …
There's many staggering about, clutching their wounds, crying out, but now the braves seem to have done their calculations and try to bring off the squaws and children towards the back of the village. Fire, fire, men, calls our sergeant, and we reload like lunatics and fire. Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Powder, ball, ram, cap, cock, and fire. Over and over, and over and over Death at his frantic task in the village, gathering souls. We work in our lather of strange sorrow, but utterly revengeful, fiercely so, soldiers of intentful termination, of total annihilation. Nothing less will slake our thirst. Nothing else will fill our hunger. As we fire, we laugh. As we fire, we cry out. As we fire, we weep.
There's a song by National Park Radio called 'These Great Plains' where the chorus goes:
And we wonder how the West was won
As we march into the setting sun
Casting shadows long as these great plains
We won’t stop until we’ve found our way
It's a nice, romanticized take on the pioneer days from a fun folksy band. This book was a slap in the face and a reminder that the West was 'won' through guns and lies and violence.
The first half of this book did not grip me if I'm being honest. The style of narration throughout was basically a first-person reminiscence of a long life, and I did feel like I was being cornered by a rambling old man that would not let me walk away. The author's stubborn refusal to follow conventional formatting (there isn't a single quotation mark in the book to denote dialogue) was a bold choice that irked me personally, but I eventually got the hang of it.
Getting used to this kind of prose was no doubt helped by a unique protagonist in Thomas McNulty, his family's sole survivor of the Irish Famine, who ends up in America and buddies up with another young boy, John Cole. I didn't find Thomas and his distinct style of speaking to be a character I really cared for until the last quarter of the book, but he did eventually come around for me the more time I spent with him. After a recap of their early days basically running a drag show in a frontier mining town that had no women (it seems out of place but actually becomes relevant to the plot waaaay later), the two join up with the army for lack of better options and there's a drastic tone shift from here on out.
Basically for the rest of the book, interspersed between genuinely impressive passages describing the surrounding nature (this is an extremely outdoors-y book that has like three scenes that take place indoors) are straight-up massacres of Native Americans at the hands of detached and firghtened American soldiers just following orders. There's a solid third of the book devoted to the outbreak of Civil War detailing what I believe to be the First Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Shiloh, but it almost seems like a distraction because it's sandwiched on either end by campaigns against a recurring Chief, Caught-His-Horse-First. I hesitate to call him an antagonist because no one is really without fault in this book.
And this book is really an unabashed look at the ugliest parts of 19th-century America between the treatment of Native Americans, minstrel shows, the Civil War and anything else you can think of, but curiously it's told from the perspective of those who carried them out, rather than suffered them. I don't think it's an endorsement of that time period and I certainly wouldn't want to be in the place of any of the characters, but it came across more like a plea to understand that people of the time didn't think about things the way we do looking back on them. Hell, when the Civil War breaks out, some of the guys in Thomas' regiment didn't even know who the president was, and that probably was the case for a nonzero number of real soldiers.
It took a long time, maybe two-thirds of the book, before it transitioned from a fictional memoir to something resembling a plot if you squinted hard enough. Which is a shame because I found myself getting exponentially drawn in during the final three chapters or so, only to be hit with one of the most abrupt endings I've ever read that genuinely left me in a state of whiplash. The last two pages feel like they could've been stretched out for two chapters and they just... weren't for some reason.
Most of the enjoyment I wrought out of this book came from the stellar descriptions of nature, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying and downright dangerous; I felt like I was visiting multiple different distinct parts of the country throughout Thomas' life. There also was a fascinating look at Thomas' relationships with his own gender and with John Cole that I wish were given more time to shine. It'd be disingenuous to market this book as a gay historical fiction because their unquestionably romantic and sexual relationship is presented early and nonchalantly, then rarely brought up again; I kept forgetting about it because it wasn't the focus of the book. Still, I plowed through it in just three days, so it was doing something right.
