Violence and cross-dressing in post-bellum Tennessee: A Thousand Moons, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed

It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since the two soon began to swim together in my head — not least because Moons is a kind of mirror image of Days.Winona, the Indian orphan girl adopted by the Union soldiers Thomas McNulty and ‘handsome’ John Cole in Days, takes over the narration. We’re now post-civil war, and the three are scraping a living on a farm in Tennessee.

Days (with Thomas as narrator) began with two starving émigré boys earning their keep as ‘prairie fairies’ in a Missouri saloon before joining the army. Moons opens with Winona in her teens. She’s a ‘child of nothing’, her status as an Indian even lower than that of the newly freed black slaves. Hers is both a coming-of-age and a survival story.

The key incidents are her rape by a white boy and the beating of Tennyson Bouguereau, a former slave.