‘I am become a name,’ Alfred Tennyson has Ulysses declare in his 1833 poem, an epigraph that sets up Sebastian Barry’s return to 19th-century America and the imagined world of his ancestors, the McNulty clan, one of modern literature’s greatest creations.
The Newer World is the third in a trio of novels to feature Thomas McNulty, one of Barry’s forefathers, who swapped Ireland’s great famine for fighting in the Indian wars and the American civil war. It follows Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, which both explore similar territory and contain many of the same characters, although each book stands alone.
Here, Barry’s focus is on Tennyson Bouguereau, who was born a slave in 1840s Tennessee, growing into his name in this deft and compelling story, narrated from the protagonist’s first-person perspective. As before, the novel is both historical and yet contemporary in its concerns, with the racism of Reconstruction echoing the prejudice of today as Barry chips away at the myth of modern America. ‘That was our work. To cancel freedom. We were freedom hunters. To shoot it down,’ writes Tennyson (who also appears in A Thousand Moons) of his time in the army hunting the Apaches.
But first, Tennyson’s tale, which opens with his father, Chas Bouguereau, a ‘free skin’ from Louisiana who settled in Paris, Tennessee in 1840. ‘A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio,’ writes Tennyson, who is telling his story from the vantage point of the early 1900s. He owes his educated prose to the efforts of a young lawyer, Briscoe, ‘one of those improving people’ and another of Barry’s previous characters. ‘A wonder then, and a wonder now, to contemplate,’ he thinks, looking back. All Tennyson and his twin sister Rosalee knew of their father were stories their mother passed on. Chas is dead by the end of Chapter One, hanged from a black-nut tree after attempting to rob a bank to buy the freedom of a slave girl, Cissy, their mother.
Stories, the vagaries of memory, and the power to shape one’s own narrative are Barry’s central themes, along with compassion. If this seems strange for a novel set during the Reconstruction era, when many southerners behaved as if the Confederacy hadn’t lost, it is testament to Barry’s power to see both sides to a situation, however grim. ‘If the war had not ruined Petrie and his men, he would never have stepped onto our ground,’ thinks Tennyson, of a raid on the land he calls home by their ‘butternut’ neighbours.
Home and the pull it exerts is another key concern, with Tennyson reminded often of Odysseus, who ‘had a sickness in him because he needed to return home’. Tennyson has a ‘strong desire’ to get back, despite his adventures, which take him to Victorian England with the Fisk Jubilee singers, who popularised ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ among many other African-American spirituals. Barry, a former laureate for Irish fiction who has had five Booker-prize listings, delivers all this in prose that has a music of its own, from choppy, single-word sentences to the crescendo that describes a desert Apache ambush.
The newer world that emerges from Barry’s pages may be as prejudiced and complicated as the one Tennyson was born into, but somehow this masterful novel leaves you with hope – not least that this isn’t the last time we will hear from the McNultys and their friends.
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