197. Days Without End
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Sebastian Barry
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western
259 pages, published January 24, 2017
Reading Format: Audio Book on Hoopla
Summary
Days Without End is a western set in the middle of the 1800’s, during the American Indian and Civil Wars. It is narrated by seventeen year old Thomas McNulty who fled Ireland’s Great Famine for a better life in America. Thomas, along with his best friend and lover John Cole, joins the U.S. Army in the 1850s. The men witness repeated cruelties, but rely on each other for love and create a family with a young Sioux girl.
Quotes
“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”
“There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that’s just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster.”
“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
“Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”
“Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.”
“It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.”
“The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.”
“Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.”
My Take
While I am typically not a big fan of the Western genre, I did really enjoy Days Without End which received numerous accolades: Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist, Costa Book Award for Novel, Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize, Costa Book of the Year and HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown Nominee for Longlist. While Barry vividly captures the rough and tumble of war time America in the middle of the 19th Century, the compelling part of his story are the characters of Thomas McNulty and John Cole who start a relationship when they are both hired to dress up as women and dance with miners. As the story progresses, the reader is impressed with their fundamental decency during an indecent time and their affection for each other and the Indian girl they save and adopt. Recommended.
