The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, by Sebastian Barry, Picador, 308pp, £12.99 in UK
`Well, he is sitting in the high grass at the back of the Convent for the moment with Tuppenny Jane and indeed it is warlike enough for him the while. The grasses are rich in meadowsweet and big yellow flares of ragwort, it is a sight. There is a thrumming of crickets to beat the band. How the world gets itself into such a state of heat, he does not know."
Sebastian Barry's first novel in a decade is a linguistic delight. But be prepared. It is written in a sort of parlour-song patois which teeters on the brink of stageOirishry at times, although it is an entirely apt narrative voice for the novel's whimsical hero.
Barry's subject is the War of Independence. But it is a sidelong view, the view of an outsider, a man who has been made an outsider by events he can hardly understand.
Eneas McNulty is as old as the century. Born in 1900 in Sligo, his happiest period is his early childhood, the halcyon days of "the single child amid resplendent parents", a kingdom lost to him with the arrival of younger siblings. As compensation, he wins the confidence of Jonno Lynch, the local wide-boy, and the two enjoy a brief bloom of friendship.
As a teenager he joins the British Navy and spends a rather desultory first World War in the bar-rooms of Galveston, Texas. Homesickness for Sligo brings him back and after some time hanging about the house with his beloved Pappy and Mam he signs up for the RIC. This, it turns out, is his biggest mistake.
Because Eneas is such a youthful innocent, he does not realise the full import of what he has done until he witnesses a reprisal killing by the IRA and is advised by the powers-that-be that he should quit the force. He returns again to his beloved Sligo thinking that is the end of the matter. But he soon finds out the price he has to pay for such heedlessness. The IRA, personified by his erstwhile pal, Lynch, puts him on a death list. At first he thinks he can stick it out, keep his head down and wait for the political climate to change. But for Eneas McNulty, the political climate never changes. In the end he is forced to leave Sligo, this time permanently.
Eneas is a Kafkaesque hero. He is almost pathologically innocent; the severity of his punishment seems calibrated by his almost perverse inability to understand what he has done wrong. ("Bloody politics! Deathly killing, seducing politics. Feckin ould freedom anyway.")
The remainder of the novel is a picaresque account of Eneas's wanderings, first of all another stint at sea on a trawler off Grimsby, then service in another war - the second World War, in which he fights at Dunkirk - followed by a stint in Africa, and then to the Isle of Dogs in London where he ends up running a hostel for old sea dogs. In between there are several attempts to return to Sligo but though Eneas finds much is changed in, first, the Free State, and then the Republic, he remains "under pain of death". Barry's preoccupations, though, are not with the politics of the situation as much as the plight of those ruined by the politics, the men, as he puts it, whose names are not written in the book of life. This novel is about reclaiming the history of "unimpressive man, disappeared man" and granting him a place in the annals of fiction.
The tragedy of Eneas is that the very simple ambitions which he yearns for seem irretrievably out of bounds: "He sees his niece and his brother and feels the bareness of his own life . . . he is distressed at the empty rooms of his own progress in the world. No children, no wife, no picture house where human actions unfold and are warmly enacted. He can barely remember why his life is so bare, he is that used to it."
But like a twisted tree which grows around an obstacle, Eneas compensates for a stunted emotional life with his male friendships. His relationship with fellow outcast, Harcourt, a Nigerian, has all the baffled tenderness and bemused concern of an enduring marriage. In this, his innocence, his childlike sense of trust, aids him.
Barry's return to fiction is as invigorating as his recent success on the stage. He has created in the character of wandering Eneas McNulty a figure who is both imaginatively singular and universally emblematic, and in this novel, a funny, tender, poignant portrayal of a life thwarted by an absence of guile.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist, and an Irish Times staff journalist