It's pretty well unheard of for me to like a book so much that I can't find adequate words to describe it. But that is how I am feeling now. Regular visitors will know how much I enjoyed Barry's Secret Scripture, which failed, for some unaccountable reason, to win this year's Booker Prize. And here we have his earlier novel which unaccountably failed to win the 2005 Booker. Well, the Booker is a bit of a mystery to me and I certainly don't envy the judges, but I sure would like to have seen this one win. Why, you might wonder, when I am such a fan of Barry, did I wait so long before reading this one? The answer is simple -- because it was about war, a subject I usually avoid like the plague. I have even "read" War and Peace twice, but only the Peace bits. But I am so so glad I decided to take the plunge here.
This is the story of a young Dublin man, Willy Dunne. Aged just seventeen when the First World War breaks out, he joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, wanting to "play his part", and to protect girls like his beloved sweetheart Gretta from being killed by the Germans in Belgium. Of course you will not need to be told that his idealism is soon eroded by the terrible things he witnesses in the trenches of Belgium. The wholesale slaughter, the mustard gas, the deaths of his friends and comrades, the filthy conditions -- all these we all think we know about already. But I can tell you that with all my supposed wisdom and knowledge of these things, they have never been so fiercely alive to me as they became in reading this novel. That's not all, though. Remember that Willie, as a young Catholic Irishman, is fighting on behalf of a country that has oppressed him and his ancestors since time immemorial. And if that were not enough, on his precious leave at home in Dublin, he finds himself in the midst of the Easter Rising of 1916, where he sees his fellow Irishmen fighting against the British in the streets, and is flung, as a result, into a state of deep confusion and misery. Does this all sound upsetting and disturbing? Well, in one way it is. But it is also one of the most beautiful and uplifting novels I have read in a long time, perhaps ever. Because through it all persists Willie's spirit, still able occasionally to laugh, to feel love, and above all somehow to endure. Sebastian Barry writes the most poetic prose of any novelist living today, I suspect, and there are so many wonderful moments in this book that I would like to quote for you if I had time and space. Just for a taste, here is the response of the soldiers as they listen to a man singing at an impromptu concert:
Each man to his own inward thinking, glimpses of the beloved faces left behind, shadows of arguments unfinished and regretted, the sense of youth not vanishing but being submerged in a killing sea from which no one might emerge, bathed in the acid blood of bomb or bullet. Stretch of road loved and itemized, fold of field, loved turn of shoulder of a wife, her feet crossing the boards of a bedroom, her clothes thrown across a chair. The voice of a singing child, the sound of a child peeing in the pot, the tremendous affection of son or daughter, soft hair, big eyes, the struggle to find meat and cake. For single men the memories of their Grettas, foul words and good words, failed words of love and triumphant. How human nature fell ever short, but could be summoned to illumine the dark tracts of a life nonetheless. All the matter and difficulty of being alive in a place of peace and a place of war.
And here is a grand sweep of the effects of the war:
...great armies were massing everywhere, great divisions, so that a single man was only one flickering light in a wide sky of millions. There must be movement on the front, all were agreed. The French boys were drowning in the caverns of Verdun, drowning in their own blood. Millions must push millions. The Kaiser sent his myriad boys, the King of England his. Great troops of women followed, to bandage, bolster and bury. And all of England, and all old empires, British, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, the empires of halfpenny lives and the hungry sad kings and commoners all party to the same haze, strained for news, and the mountains stood away, and a thousand widows wore their black ribbons in Ireland on their arms, and were treated kindly in the main, with whispered sympathy and whatever was left of wise words. Because the box of wise words was emptying.
My own experience of reading this novel was one of almost continuously feeling on the verge of tears, though sometimes laughing, too, at the great humour of those brave, simple, good-hearted Irish boys trying to keep their sanity among unthinkably appalling experiences. There is no one I can think of who would not benefit from reading it so I hope you will, if you haven't already.
