Monthly Archives: September 2026

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

Posted on by
7

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End. Faber & Faber pb, 2017; first published 2016. 301 pp. Library copy

I had mixed feelings about this novel by Irish author Sebastian Barry. It’s a rattling good story, full of exciting and often brutal action and incident, and narrated in a distinctive Irish-American vernacular, complete with grammatical and other foibles and idiosyncrasies. At its best this prose is lyrical and soaringly beautiful, but at times it becomes grating and too mannered. It’s reminiscent of Huck Finn’s voice, with shades of Cormac McCarthy also evident.

Irish-born Thomas McNulty meets another teenager, ‘handsome’ John Cole in Missouri. They get a bizarre job as a sort of drag act in a rough mining town bar, doubling as pay-per-dance partners for the grizzled, womanless clientele.

There follows a long sequence of bloody encounters when they join the army. Some of these involve the shameful betrayals and massacres of the native Americans of the Midwest, ironically perpetrated by a predominantly Irish-American soldiery whose forebears had suffered similar depredations at the hands of Cromwell and subsequent repressive British colonists, then the famine that is also seen to be prevalent among these indigenous tribes.

As a consequence of some of these vicious exchanges and some savage revenge attacks, Thomas and John end up as unlikely adoptive parents of the niece of a Sioux chief. They name her Winona, which they claim means first-born daughter in the Sioux language; I haven’t checked this, and of course it brought to mind the famous Hollywood actor of that name, most recently featuring in Stranger Things.

Then they get caught up in the equally brutal Civil War, where some of the battle scenes put me in mind of some of those in The Odyssey and The Iliad. There’s a gruelling sequence set in the notorious rebel POW camp, Andersonville, where Thomas and John are held until released under an exchange scheme.

Winona is another who becomes an exchange, this time for a kidnapped white American child, and Thomas is forced to make some tough choices in order to rescue her. All kinds of mayhem ensue, and he narrowly escapes being executed by the Union army on charges of desertion and murder.

The narrative voice I mentioned at the start is the most extraordinary feature of this novel. Here’s an example of its best aspect; Thomas is describing, in that characteristically demotic style, a tough sergeant he serves under:

…he looks like an old man. Like we got ten faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.

There’s an almost biblical grandeur to some of the descriptions of the wild American landscapes Thomas travels through in various seasons, and of the often harrowing experiences he and John undergo.

Ultimately, though I enjoyed the novel immensely as a fast-paced, incident-packed yarn, with moments of breathtaking beauty in the language, I found it all a bit too frantic. The love affair between Thomas and John is often touching and tenderly evoked, but it veers into unlikely and anachronistic modernity at times. The ending is a bit pat, too.

But I shall be ordering from my local library some more of Barry’s sequence of McNulty novels – just not yet. I need something a little less disturbing first.

Mavis Gallant and a new Elizabeth Strout novel

Posted on by
2

Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say. Penguin Viking hb, 2026, 201pp. Library copy

After my immersion in Greek and Latin classics, I read the first half dozen or so of the Collected Stories of Canadian author Mavis Gallant. They were beautifully written, but I found them too ‘literary’ – hard to explain, but sort of self-consciously ‘clever’ and oblique. Very serious, too; sombre and a bit depressing.

What a relief to turn to the latest Elizabeth Strout. Her approach is very different from Gallant’s. Her style is (deceptively) simple and lucid, smooth and accessible – and yet one feels there’s real human depth and complexity in her characters.

There’s much of the same kind of existential crisis going on as in her other fiction. Artie Dam, a 57-year-old high school teacher of history, has lost direction and grounding (if that horribly mixed metaphor makes any kind of sense). A devastating piece of news further destabilises him, and he’s forced to reassess his closest relationships.

It’s difficult to say much more without spoilers. The backdrop is the election for his second term of President T (can’t bring myself to write his name), and Artie is distraught as his country heads for disaster. He tries to reassure his teenage students that all will be well – no more civil wars or fascist regimes – provided they don’t succumb to this president’s brand of divisive populism and nationalism.

There are numerous other characters, all of whom are well rounded and convincing – unlike some of Gallant’s bloodless expats and waifs. (I know I’m very much in the minority in not raving about the brilliance of her work – opinions differ, to paraphrase a statement made by the British royal household in the recent past).

Artie’s son Rob is also traumatised by life events; like Artie there’s an anguish and loneliness about him – as in so many of Strout’s characters. They find it hard to tell each other the important things – hence the title.

At times the narrative strays into sentimentality, as in some of the classroom scenes in which Artie’s love for his students is emphasised a little too much, while the devotion and affection of his students for him is at least tempered by some of them being pretty hostile. His teaching style falls foul of the rise in ‘anti-woke’ sentiment instigated by the new political administration.

Artie’s growing obsession with ‘free will’, and flashes of ‘precognition’ also stretch credibility rather too much – gratuitous discussions of Jungian psychology and philosophy become intrusive.

As his wife says – a sign of the growing disconnect in his marriage – Artie is too ‘soft’. Another character urges him to carry on being ‘jovial’. He’s a sad mix of decency and despair. Artie is I suppose a sort of Trump-era Willie Loman, a broken victim of what’s going wrong in our world; at one point he reflects that he doesn’t want to die, but isn’t sure he wants to live.

This second-term president has a lot to answer for.

Virgil, The Aeneid

Posted on by
6

Virgil, The Aeneid. Translated from the Latin of Virgil (70-19 BC) by W.F. Jackson Knight. Penguin Classics, 1964 (first published 1956), 361pp.

As Knight says in his introduction to this prose translation of Virgil’s epic, unfinished poem, The Aeneid, it is a ‘legendary narrative’ about ‘the imagined origin of the Roman nation in times long before the foundation of Rome itself’. According to legend some Romans could trace their origins back to the Trojans who escaped the sack of their city by the Greeks (as told in The Odyssey and The Iliad, about which I posted recently, having just seen the Nolan film).

The Trojan prince Aeneas is said to have fled Troy and sailed with a group of others to the west coast of Italy, experiencing various trials, setbacks and adventures on the way. In this sense it resembles The Odyssey, and echoes many of the incidents endured by Odysseus/Ulysses in those Greek epics. Aeneas and his compatriots settled there, having fought a bloody war with jealous locals, and their descendants are later said to have played a part in the founding of Rome. So it’s a sort of origin story, as well as another adventure/voyage/quest narrative.

One of the most striking parallels with the adventures of Odysseus on his homeward journey relates Aeneas’ romantic idyll with Dido, Queen of Carthage (in Odysseus’ case it was Calypso). Purcell’s beautiful lament of Dido from his 1688 opera, which takes place when she’s abandoned by Aeneas, who’d been summoned by the gods to resume his quest, is a haunting companion to the depiction of her grief, anger and despondency as related in The Aeneid. The Trojan hero doesn’t cover himself in glory here, and she’s still understandably furious with him when he later encounters her shade in the underworld (another parallel scene with the one in The Odyssey).

My Latin is pretty rudimentary, and I don’t have a copy of Virgil’s original to consult, so I can’t get into an Emily Wilson kind of analysis of Knight’s prose translation. All I can do is comment on some aspects of it as an English version.

Knight favours an uneasy blend of faux-archaic and lofty ‘literary’ style with occasional more readable, smooth-flowing vernacular. But mostly it’s the former. Here’s an example chosen at random; it’s from Book 6, ‘The Visit to the Underworld’.

From this place starts the road which leads to Tartarean Acheron. There in mud and murk seethes the Abyss…[Then there’s a description of Charon, the underworld’s ferryman] a ragged figure, filthy, repulsive, with white hair copious and unkempt covering his chin…

Most of that isn’t too clunky, but why those foregrounded inversions and unnatural word order? ‘White hair copious’ just sounds like a literal translation from a language which doesn’t have the same adjective-precedes-the-noun sort of structure as English. I know that Latin, as an inflected language, has very different structures and word order from ours, and Knight is no doubt trying to convey some of the high style of the original. But as Wilson says in her essays reviewed here last time, it’s still necessary to write well when translating, to strive to produce an English text that’s enjoyable to read.

It’s a difficult feat to pull off, and I don’t mean to be too hard on Knight; but I’d be interested to hear if anyone knows of a more recent translation that works better.

Old words, new voices: Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

Posted on by
9

Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: journeys through ancient literature. Profile Books/LRB, 2026, pb, 280 pp.

How to ‘give old words new voices’.

This was a birthday gift from some friends with whom I’d had discussions about the Nolan film ‘Odysseus’, and who knew about my subsequent reading of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (posted about recently here).

It’s a collection of 13 essays, some of them revised versions of ones that were published in various literary and specialist academic journals, on the theory, nature and practice of translation. How far is it possible to convey the sense, meaning, cultural and other values, and a whole range of related matters, in translations of texts from so long ago that we find it almost impossible to imagine what life might have been like then.

Can the translator somehow render those ancient words into readable versions, preferably almost as well-written as the originals, that make accessible to the modern reader those texts that were the products of an oral literary culture, probably performed by professionals and choruses who either memorised the written texts, or extemporised around well-established tropes and images.

Should the translator of an original that was written in verse try to bend her own very different language, with its different sounds, rhythms and nuances, into verse as well? Does translating them into prose in some way traduce the intentions and effects of the verse original? What about dealing with tricky linguistic matters like idioms, or words that have no modern equivalent?

These and a host of other fascinating questions are raised and discussed in these brilliant, perceptive and erudite essays. Wilson frequently compares different translators’ versions of a key passage from the ancient Greek, analysing the choices and assessing their various degrees of success. I didn’t always agree with her conclusions, but they were always carefully presented and argued.

Because of my recent film and reading experiences I turned first to the final essay, ‘Translating The Odyssey’. It’s highly accessible, witty, insightful and thought-provoking. Wilson considers, for example, the problems for the translator in contextualising and rendering into English for modern sensibilities passages like the one in which Odysseus’ son Telemachus hangs the slave women who were sexual possessions of Penelope’s suitors. Should this shocking scene be made to arouse sympathy for the slaughtered women, or indicate the social and cultural assumptions in Homer that they had dishonoured Odysseus and his son: both the suitors and the women had to die in order for honour to be restored.

It’s difficult for the reader today to avoid feeling the injustice in this scene – something which it seems would not have troubled Homer or his contemporary audience. Or at least, in his presentation of the world of honour of those characters at that time.

The other essays deal with similar crucial moments in a range of old Greek texts, most of which I know little about, from Aeschylus to Sophocles. Classical Roman authors and texts are also considered in their responses to these Greek works. There’s a particularly inspiring essay on ‘slut-shaming of Helen of Troy’ – a title which sums up Wilson’s jaunty habit of slipping into slang and the vernacular to convey some of the spirit of the original texts, and our responses to them. It’s a very scholarly and deeply researched approach, but is never stuffy or over-academic in tone. So there are references to the likes of Cardi B and Wodehouse’s Jeeves to help us place the literary equivalence of some of these ‘old words’, characters and themes.

One contemporary reference I found particularly congenial. In discussing the notion of ‘classical studies’ in the last century or so, she points out how it has tended to form a kind of ‘gatekeeping’, an indication that their reader has been to a ‘good school’ (UK code for what we call a public, ie private school, definitely all-male) which maintains traditional standards of a ‘classical education’:

The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek – or at least, knowing enough to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy – has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs…[it’s become associated with] systems of exclusion based on income, education, race and gender. In the United Kingdom, its cultural capital remains high enough that Boris Johnson – an incompetent drunkard whose social privilege enabled him to attend Eton and…Balliol College, Oxford – managed to hold the highest political office in the land for an astonishingly long period of time, and even maintain the illusion of being an intellectual partly on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek. No other party trick could have served him as well. Thanks to centuries of culturally ingrained snobbery, even a passing acquaintance with these languages is still often considered a sign of extraordinary intelligence… (p.182)

I make no apology for quoting most of that passage, because I think it demonstrates Wilson’s refreshingly unsnobbish, even iconoclastic approach: her love of and enthusiasm for the classics doesn’t prevent her from acknowledging this uncomfortable tendency towards snobbery and arrogance in the modern British world of classical studies.

It all made me think of my own studies at university of Old English and Middle English literature. How can we reimagine the force and intention of texts produced in such alien and distant times and contexts, with such different, often abhorrent, attitudes and beliefs embedded in them – for example to class, women’s place in those worlds, war, culture, the enslavement or colonisation of people.

Even if, like me, you know very little about the classics, I’m sure you’d find this collection of essays very stimulating.