Sebastian Barry: ‘We shouldn’t always want to be as grand as Joyce or Beckett’

“I was talking to Graham Norton and he said, rather wonderfully, ‘I didn’t think you were a sequels guy!’ I thought, ‘What the hell is a sequels guy?!’ ” Sebastian Barry laughs. We’re sitting in Brooks Hotel in Drury Street, as Storm Ciara batters Dublin outside. Barry is here to talk about his new novel A Thousand Moons, which follows several of the characters from his last book Days Without End. But is it really a sequel?

“Technically it’s a sequel,” Barry says, “because in my film contract for Days Without End, anything to do with those people will be considered to be a sequel. It’s rare enough in a literary fiction world to do that.”

“Those people” are the family at the heart of Days Without End: Irish emigrant to the American west Thomas McNulty, his partner John Cole, and the Sioux girl they informally adopted, Winona. Here, the action has moved on to the 1870s, and the story is told by Winona.

Days Without End was perhaps the most successful novel of Barry’s career, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction in the UK, and has been named by the Guardian as one of the best books of the 21st century. The wider attention it brought him is still a source of pleasure. “Once you creep past 60 it’s a rather thrilling fact that you can feel with a book that you’ve stepped out of your subsistence farm to find it in the wider lands.”

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Thomas McNulty and John Cole became much-loved characters, the sort that readers identify with and root for. “Someone online said I’d ruined her life unless she could find someone who would love her as Thomas loves John.” But in A Thousand Moons the two men are settled in the background, as parents are to any growing child, and the story is all Winona’s.

Barry says he felt a responsibility to tell the story from a native American viewpoint, because despite the goodness of the characters of Thomas and John, “the thought remained naggingly in my head that they were complicit in the destruction of [Winona’s] people.”

Indeed, even though it is Winona’s story told in her own voice, the hand of the colonialist is there in the very fabric of her story: the first thing she tells us is that her name is not Winona, it is Ojinjintka, but Thomas couldn’t pronounce the Sioux name so “he gave me my dead cousin’s name because it was easier in his mouth”. So, says Barry, “she’s at one remove” from her own story. Of course, he adds, “for us as Irish people that has very complex side thoughts too, doesn’t it? Whose language are we speaking?”

19th-century America

In A Thousand Moons, Winona is a resourceful, brave girl, destined to be as widely loved a character as Thomas and John before her, and she undergoes a series of trials which highlight the treatment of native people in 19th-century America.

It’s not revealing too much to say that one thread reflects “the whole blaze of the Me Too movement” inspired by Barry’s “very dynamic” daughters, just as Days Without End chimed with his son Toby’s coming out.

“I was privileged to be close to two examples of this astonishing courage that’s required” to be a woman in society. “There probably isn’t a young woman alive who hasn’t had some bloody trouble with some bloody person and I’m trying to recognise that. Not trying to make up for it, just to notice it.”

I'm sort of touching the web of another book that's associated with this. So that would make it three

Other echoes of modern mores run through the book, such as gender fluidity: Winona presents herself as a boy for a time, and in her family, Thomas is “Mamma” and John Cole the father figure.

The book’s title is a marker of this circularity: that there is nothing new under the sun. “For my mother,” writes Winona, “time was a kind of hoop or a circle, not a long string. If you walked far enough, she said, you could find the people still living who had lived in the long ago. ‘A thousand moons all at once,’ she called it.”

One thing that stood out about Days Without End was the voice in which Thomas McNulty told his story: a great fluent wave of language, roughly eloquent where Barry’s earlier novels had been known for their careful precision. Winona’s is different again: less flamboyant, more direct and “much quieter,” says Barry now, “because her concerns are more delicate” – the concerns of a young woman of colour making her way in a white man’s world.

A Thousand Moons is stuffed too with secondary characters that grab the reader by the lapels, with vivid names to roll around the mouth that remind us of Barry’s knack with language: Jas Jonski, who believes himself to be in love with Winona; Reverend Wynkle King; Aurelius Littlefair the judge, “named for a philosopher emperor” as Winona puts it. The reader gets the sense that Barry had great fun making up these colourful names.

“I don’t always make them up!” he says. “Two of them were taken from when I was at some friend’s funeral at Mount Jerome, you know, plaques on the wall.” He didn’t want the characters to have that “Dickensian characteristic” where the name speaks to the qualities of the character. And yes, Aurelius Littlefair was named for the Roman emperor. “One of my favourite philosophers.”

Cultural appropriation

It seems unlikely that Barry’s sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of a native American woman will come in for criticism on grounds of cultural appropriation, as Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt has recently.

“I know her, so I followed [the story],” he says: he met Cummins in Connecticut about 15 years ago. The success of her book should be cause for celebration, he feels. “She’s written four books. She would have had tuppence-ha’penny like everybody else. Most writers if they’re lucky earn five thousand a year. So Janine does her five years of research, she gives it to her agent – there’s no money involved at this point.”

And when the agent sold the book, reputedly for seven figures, “that’s like the great day in the life of a writer.” Some novelists have joined the criticism, but writers, Barry says, “should never criticise other writers”.

Indeed he has been a great supporter of other authors. In his term as the Laureate for Irish Fiction, which he took over from Anne Enright and which runs until the end of this year, he produces a regular podcast with other Irish writers and also runs a book club that reaches out to mental hospitals, prisons and other underserved locations. He is enthusiastic particularly about some of the new short story writers in Ireland such as Nicole Flattery and Danielle McLaughlin.

On the latter he is rhapsodic: “Holy mackerel! Oh my God, it’s a pleasure just as a human being to witness this level of skill. Katherine Mansfield would be her closest relative, just in terms of sheer authority of writing.”

Barry is a warm and affable raconteur, and persuasive when he speaks. His answers come indirectly, usually at the end of an anecdote: he’s a storyteller through and through. And what makes A Thousand Moons stand out from some of his earlier novels is the drive of the plot, which towards the end makes it feel almost like a thriller.

(Though, as he points out, given the things that happen, “chiller” might be more accurate.) Did he consciously want to give the book a strong narrative drive?

“Well, I’m very interested in that now,” he says. “Because we’re all the prisoner children of modernism. I was brought up to think that you had to continue on from obviously Joyce and Beckett. Unfortunately the concomitant thought of that is that everyone else is rubbish!” He laughs.

Barry explains that he started out trying to write experimental fiction (his second novel, The Engine of Owl-Light, was one such effort). The novelist Brian Moore said that the great engines of plot – the thriller and the journey form – were “the gut of fiction, but they’re being left to second-rate writers because first-rate writers are bringing the author into the novel and all those nouveau-roman things”.

‘A wickedness’

Barry agrees: “This is the thing that even in Dickens' day made some people think he was just the most appalling low-grade artist.” He noticed “a natural plottiness” happening when he was writing Days Without End, which continued with A Thousand Moons, allowing Winona’s character, her responses and her desire to “deal with the thing herself” to control the story.

“And it almost feels like an apostasy or a wickedness to give in to this. But it’s not giving in, it’s a grateful reception of plot!”

The novel, he adds, is a democratic form. “It shouldn’t be made unnecessarily impossible, unless you really have to do that. And not everyone ought to. The most complex modern writer is probably John Banville, but you know, the day he was born he was looking for a different milk formula. He’s a complicated person and it’s proper to him. But we shouldn’t always want to be as grand as Joyce or Beckett.”

Barry is an acclaimed playwright as well as a novelist, and his most famous play The Steward of Christendom was inspired by his great-grandfather, the former head of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who appears in the play as Thomas Dunne. What does Barry make of the postponement of the centenary commemoration of the DMP/Royal Irish Regiment?

“Well, that was frankly heartbreaking,” he says immediately. “Look, it’s all dark history. It’s history literally with no light on it. I thought I was going to be run out of the country for The Steward of Christendom because [Thomas Dunne] was the sort of idea of a traitor. But when you write something . . . at the end of the day, here is a man who has lived a life on this earth.” On the postponement: “I can see why people would resist it. But that note of nationalism, which I suppose has just been struck in the election as well, it was a bit obliterating actually.”

A Thousand Moons extends the sequence of Barry’s novels, which centre on the worlds of the Dunnes and the McNultys. “It’s like a cosmos or a little planet. The books are all looking at each other. And there’s eight of them now, I’m really rather pleased about that, and they have a gravity that enables them to stay within orbit of each other.”

And what comes next? More from the McNultys? “Well,” he says, “my lovely painter grandfather, at the back wall of his garden, these huge spiders lived in the wall. And he’d bring me down and he’d touch the web, tip them very gently, not break them, so the spiders would come out. And now I’m sort of touching the web of another book that’s associated with this. So that would make it three.” He smiles. “The sequel of a sequel!”

Ah, so Graham Norton was right.

[ International Literature Festival Dublin ]