Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry

"That human will. You got to give homage to it. I seen it so many times. It ain't so rare. But it's the best of us."

Wow. This is one helluva book. Absolutely incredible.

Before even cracking it open, I was unsure. An Irish writer writing a novel about the American West? I was not sure it was going to work. But boy was I wrong.

This story of an Irish immigrant in America in the time of the Indian Wars and the Civil War and America trying to find its bearings needed an Irish writer to tell it. An Irish writer is the only kind that could have given this heartbreaking and violent book the poetry and the black humor it needed to make it more than just another Civil War era novel about a young man coming of age.

The prose was lyrical and homespun and rolled downhill through the plot from St. Louis to Laramie and then back east again. It was written as if the writer was speaking it out loud and while that could have felt gimmicky or run false — the author always used “could of” instead of “could have” for example — it never once did, it instead felt sincere, transportive and, well, American.

The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.

To say something like “only an Irish writer could write like that” is of course false. The above reads like Cormac McCarthy or even Kerouac — two very American writers — but throughout the book I couldn’t help think to myself: this story needed an Irishman to tell it.

And, when you read the book, that might become a little more clear, but I am leaving a lot out as I usually do. There’s no plot twists, per se, but this is not the kind of American story you might be used to hearing, or at least not the kind you are expecting from a novel set in mid-19th century America. There’s war and trains and horses, but so much more. I don’t want to say anything further.

**

This book took me a while, despite being relatively short at 260 odd pages. It is not even all that dense but the language and the cadence required a slower paced reading. That’s not a drawback. It’s a plus. This is a story meant to be wallowed in for a while, as the language and the characters and the American West in all its beauty and tragedy fall all around you.

I loved this book.

**

Next up: On the Calculation Of Volume (Book 1), by Solvej Balle.

Thanks for reading!