The McNulty family in the novels of Sebastian Barry have a definite claim to be one of the unluckiest in all fiction. After serving with the Brits in the first world war, the main character in The Where-abouts of Eneas McNulty is branded a traitor to Ireland, and spends the rest of his days in bleak and terrified exile. In The Secret Scripture, his sister-in-law Roseanne is locked up for life in a Sligo mental asylum for having an illegitimate baby (that’s taken from her). In The Temporary Gentleman, Eneas’s brother Jack is an ageing alcoholic reflecting on the failure of virtually everything he’s ever done.
On the plus side, mind you, the McNultys have generally responded to such relentless misfortune with a stoicism that borders on the miraculous — and, in most cases, while remaining unshakeably noble.
But now, judging from Days without End, it seems the stoicism and maybe even the bad luck were in their genes all along. Here, we meet their ancestor Thomas, who, despite having to leave Ireland (and several dead relatives) in the great famine and ending up in the American army, has the same heroic ability to look on the bright side. ‘The piss froze as it left our peckers,’ he recalls of one winter camp, ‘and woe betide the man with an obstruction or hesitation to their shit, because soon they had a brown icicle on their arse… It was as good a life as most of us had ever knowed.’
He’s not kidding either. Within the next four pages, the same men have endured a flash flood, a yellow fever epidemic and a march across the badlands in which ‘our bellies were gnawed by hunger’. But even then, Thomas is not disposed to pessimism: ‘Desolate and decimated though we were, there was something good there.
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