Sebastian Barry

A wonderful book. Roseanne McNulty, 100 years old, is a long-term patient of Roscommon Mental Hospital. She's Doctor Grene's patient. Secretly, she starts to record her memories, shifting, uncertain, lyrically expressed. Doctor Grene, whose own life is difficult, has access to a different version of her life story, and she does not confide her own to him. Hers was a life lived against a background of civil war and religious intolerance, of poverty, and the mental illness of her mother. Though many of her memories are bleak, Roseanne herself is warm, often funny, always sympathetic. Dr. Grene's losses and hurts are woven into the narrative, and at the end, his history, and that of Roseanne are interlinked in a most surprising way. This is a beautifully written and tragic novel about damaged but utterly sympathetic characters.… (more)

We're in Dublin in the 1990s, meeting the widowed and recently retired Tom Kettle, who had been a police detective, I immediately engaged with this novel, which lilted along in a strong Irish accent, and which I'd have happily read with no plot at all, for the sake of accompanying Tom Kettle through his retirement. But there is a plot. And it's not straightforward. It loops back and forth through memory, and I really don't want to give anything away except to say it does involve the sad, bad old story of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy. Kettle is an unreliable narrator. Facts haze in and out, can be deliberately confusing. How difficult it is to tell a story rooted in a barely-remembered or understood past. But there is love, enduring love, underlying everything. A book to savour, despite the unappetising events that underpin it.… (more)

From the opening line (“He was born in the dying days.”) Barry is clear about the theme and trajectory of this work of historical fiction which takes place mostly during WW1. Shifting between the tensions in Ireland, from the Easter Rising and the independence movement, to the infamous fields of Flanders and battle-scarred Belgium, Barry personifies the Lost Generation through the character of Willie Dunne. The babies born in 1896 are grist for the millstone of war, their delivery nurses blood-stained uniforms likened to butcher’s aprons.

Although the language is often beautifully rendered and a real sense of Irish sensibility permeates the book, the problem lies in its lack of revelation: there are no real surprises along the way, in either character development or narrative arc. We learn nothing we did not already know. Perhaps for those unfamiliar with 20th century Irish history or who have not read novels such as All Quiet On the Western Front and many other fine novels about the horrors of the First World War, this book may introduce new perspectives. At times, it almost felt like a checklist: innocent young Everyman, youthful lust/ love, father and son symbolizing dying of old world and the inability of the previous generations to understand the new, bromance, explanation of war (gas, attrition, no man’s land, trench, officer vs private) all dutifully employed.

One expects a war novel to describe harrowing scenes. The descriptions of gas attacks were relatively restrained and other soldier deaths were not prolonged pages of horror. The more disturbing imagery was reserved for the mutilation and rape of a woman and the butchering of an animal. Too many authors employ these scenes as a lazy way to announce The Moral Decay of War, the degradation and sheer vileness at work, while sparing the male characters similar graphic portrayals.

There are some exquisite phrasings and an immediacy to the work that certainly warrant admiration. But it is a book most of us have read before; the individual characters a little too subsumed by theme.… (more)