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.