At the beginning, having teamed up with a boy named John Cole, he is a dancer, rigged out in women’s clothing to entertain miners starved of female company a so-called “prairie fairy”. In the US, Thomas is many things, as Barry’s mobile, ambiguous characters frequently are. That thinking just burns through your brain for a while. “That’s because we were thought worthless. “That’s why no one will talk,” reflects Thomas, feeling that what has happened is simply not accounted as a subject. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with” – is later amplified by the nightmarish tale he hears from a fellow Irishman whose passage to the New World ends with corpses floating in the bilges, immured and abandoned. His brief explanation of the aptitude he and those like him show for soldiery – “How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. It is the 1850s, and Thomas has arrived in Missouri by way of Quebec, a journey that is revealed only in snippets that lightly inflect the novel. And she had no stockings” – is more than matched by the horrors that he encounters in a US in the grip of self-creation, its expansionist violence underwritten by its adherence to the notion of manifest destiny. The traumatic chaos of what he has left behind in Sligo – his family dead from famine, his country “starved in her stocking feet.
Days Without End, a fever dream of a novel that has much in common, particularly in terms of style, with Barry’s prize-winning The Secret Scripture, presents us with Thomas McNulty, who has crossed the Atlantic to rebuild his life.
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