Adam Mars-Jones THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS McNULTY by Sebastian Barry (Picador, R110)
Sebastian Barry’s new novel is so full of magnetising beauty that it all but harasses a reader into submission. You can try to protest, to say, “I’m a reader and you’re a book, can we not keep this on a professional basis?”, but the book won’t have it.
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is Barry’s first novel for 10 years, and during that decade he has made a major mark with his plays, but in these pages he seems most like a poet. Many sentences seem actively to yearn for an uneven right-hand margin to point up their rhythms and designs: “The cold desert in his mind’s eye floods with the thousand small white flowers that are the afterlife of rainfall.”
Eneas McNulty is born in Sligo at the turn of the century, and at 16 joins the navy. His taking of the king’s shilling is not a political decision: in a striking phrase applied to someone else in the book, he – and the book that contains him – might be described as being “above politics and beneath neutrality”.
After the war Eneas compounds his error of affiliation by joining the Royal Irish Constabulary and brands himself, in the changing political climate, definitively traitor. Eneas becomes a sorrowful human comet, travelling in a highly elliptical orbit far from Sligo, in search of a place and an occupation. Eneas may be named after a hero whose wanderings were ordained and finally rewarded, but he himself finds no home to replace the one he lost.
The book is a stylistic triumph. The urge to read on is not really a desire to know what happens to the hero next, but to see what new marvels of phrasing Barry will breed from his stock of pet words.
Eneas’s character is distinctly idealised, suffering and bewildered but exempted from serious internal tensions. He suffers mightily, but the prose in which his days and doings are suspended is balm for the reader if not for him.
We may wish him well in a dim sort of way, but would happily see Eneas driven to the top of the barest crag, if that would guarantee his being struck a few thousand more times by the loving lightning of his maker’s language.