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But is not the story as good as the truth?” asks Tennyson Bouguereau, the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World. Tennyson, a formerly enslaved man in post-civil war America, recounts his life story in ways that call to mind the age-old debate about whether it’s better to get our history from novelists or historians. While historians might argue that there is no contest, the question hints knowingly at the novelist’s counter-argument. It sent me searching for a line from Barry’s 2008 Costa-award winning novel, The Secret Scripture, in which the narrator describes history as “a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth”.
In her Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel suggested that history is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it”, but I tend to think of it as more of a butterfly net. Historians chase after and capture the things they deem significant. They leave things out, often deliberately. Barry’s entire body of work is a prime example of fiction’s ability to fill history’s gaps, merging personal tragedies with national ones in ways that (dare I say) demonstrate the supremacy of the form – especially for those of us descended from people for whom history never cared one whit. I was therefore intrigued to learn that he had set out to write the story of a man like Tennyson. Barry’s earlier novels refracted Irish history through the lens of two fictional Irish families, the Dunnes and the McNultys. His first foray into this period of American history in Days Without End, for which he won his second Costa award, also followed one of the McNultys – Thomas McNulty flees the Irish famine for America, where he finds himself drawn into the genocidal work of clearing Native Americans off their land, and then, together with his lover and fellow soldier, John Cole, adopts a Lakota girl, Winona, whose family they have helped slaughter. Barry picked up Winona’s story in A Thousand Moons, published in 2020, which follows her fortunes as she, Thomas and John settle on the same farm outside Paris, Tennessee that is occupied by Tennyson and his twin sister Rosalee among others.
With the publication of The Newer World, it seems a loose trilogy has taken shape, hinting at possibilities for future expansion: the authorial hand nudging Tennyson from the background into centre stage and for the time being leaving the McNultys behind. This passing of the storytelling baton – an Irish refugee ceding the floor to a Native American woman, who then does the same in favour of a formerly enslaved man – feels as urgently contemporary as the best historical fiction always does, relevant to “the writer’s now”, to borrow John Fowles’s phrase. So too does the description of a postbellum Tennessee landscape in which the Confederates may have been defeated but their ideologies are still virulently alive: “All their intent was to shove us back into the hog pen and put the hasp on tight as they could, against any further straying”.
Part Bildungsroman, part picaresque, Tennyson’s account of himself moves from the American civil war, when “the end of the world had come”, to its immediate aftermath, “a time of guns and watchfulness”. He describes himself and Rosalee, enslaved orphans in childhood, “freed but not free” in adulthood, as “nothing people”. It’s reminiscent of Winona’s description of herself as “just the cinders of an Indian fire”, and Thomas’s of the ships bringing “ruined people” from Ireland to Canada: “The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us.” The thing I like best about a Barry novel is how he gives a voice to the “nothing people” of history. It’s like pulling up a rocking chair on a shaded porch and listening as the narrator, usually in retrospective mode, attempts to reckon with what they did and what was done to them. It’s an astonishing effect, especially when you consider the near-miracles Barry performs with language. In his hands it attains registers that can only be described as soaring; a vertiginous high wire of prose. Here, for example, is Tennyson describing a reunion with his sister at sunset, after many years: “The harbour of my brave sister. The darkness growing in courage and, since it met no enemy, having its little victory everywhere. Pleasing darkness, in its way. There was bliss in those long moments”.
Putting this kind of arresting language into the mouths of “nothing people” makes it impossible to overlook them, as if only in fiction can they be given their due. And there is also a compelling point in using language from the poetic realm to reveal rather than cloak atrocities, its rhythms building to an unrelenting lyricism, a juggernaut that gains power precisely because it is not just set alongside brutality but entwined with it. Here is a siege, after Tennyson has enlisted in the army: “Men cried out as the life was lifted from them. All in the cruel dark.” Cruelty is endured and inflicted by the same people. In Days Without End, Thomas McNulty, an Irish famine victim, takes part in slaughtering Indigenous Americans; in The Newer World, Tennyson, an African American victim of enslavement, does the same. It is “never enough for Americans to live in their American paradise. There had to be blood and chaos all the while too.” What does it mean to be part of a “killing machine” where “[e]ven one death was a personal matter”?
I can think of no other writer who could, as Barry does, describe blood and chaos in language that reaches for such a high register, as if at the same time invoking paradise, in an attempt to answer that question. I can also think of few whose natural writerly empathy, evidenced by such an impressive body of work, pre-empts the otherwise inevitable discussion about cultural appropriation. Any writer has the right to imagine any point of view, but few truly earn it.
