LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Award announced last month, is a story of migration and massacre; of bravery and brutality; of family, friendship and gender fluidity told in the unique voice of an Irishman in 1850s America.

His family wiped out by the potato famine, Thomas McNulty faces unspeakable horrors crossing the Atlantic to Québec. From there he travels south to Missouri and has his first stroke of good luck when he falls in with another boy from Ireland, John Cole. For two happy years they find employment as dancing partners to the miners whose manners improve remarkably in the company of boys dressed as girls, although it probably helps that the owner of the saloon has a weapon behind the bar to discourage marauding hands. At seventeen, too old to pass as female, the pair join the U.S. Army, whose objective at that point is safeguarding California for the White settlers. One particular violent skirmish leads to a group of orphaned Sioux children given shelter in the fort and schooled by the major’s wife. Thomas befriends one of them, known as Winona because he can’t pronounce her real name, and, when the young men complete their term and leave the service, she accompanies them, first as a servant and then as a daughter.

John and Thomas have been a couple since their dancing days, but it’s the presence of Winona that gives them a sense of family. For a while they perform a stage act which enables Thomas to don a dress once more, in which he increasingly feels more comfortable (p234):

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake up with the same.

But another war is looming and, inspired by their friendship with a free-born Black employee at the theatre, the couple leave Winona in his care and go off to fight the civil war.

Although I liked it, I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as I expected. The voice is impressive, but I found it distancing, and, although I relished the in-between stuff, I’m afraid my attention wavered each time they went off to war. But I’m thankful to Faber and Faber for my review copy and welcome the steady creep of diversity into fictional retellings of the past.

Days Without End is my only reading contribution to LGBT history month this year, but much of the content of last year’s celebratory post – highlighting favourite reads as well as my own novel – remains relevant. However, with the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, Britain is having an LGBT history year. I’m honoured to be invited to speak at the launch of local project, Other Stories, documenting LGBT histories in and around Derbyshire, on 27 February. I’m looking forward to sharing my fictional history and learning more about others.

Meanwhile, Charli’s flash fiction prompts get increasingly challenging: how do you write a 99-word story about a rainbow in a puddle? I wasn’t sure, until I remembered that the rainbow is a symbol of Gay Pride, bright colours being the means for gay people to recognise each other, especially when other forms of connecting were outlawed.

I cannot kill a rainbow.

Even our uniforms are mud coloured, the better to blend with the terrain. Where once was meadow, now is quagmire; our every step hefts a sticky stinking shadow, as if our boots have built a platform sole. No grass, no flowers, no sun to lift the spirits; the only bright spot on the battlefield is blood. Mud paints our hearts with fear and hatred. Where massacre is our mission, colour is a crime. Thus I meet my enemy across a muddy puddle, until I recognise the badge on his lapel. I cannot kill a rainbow. I cannot murder love.