A happy and contented family, they set up home in Tennessee, where Thomas lives as, and is accepted as, a woman. Through a strange set of circumstances they end up adopting a little Indian girl, who they call Winona, ‘a flower of a girl’, who grows up to be their help, their pride and their joy. This moment is significant not just for what is reveals to the boys about gender it also points forward to an important transformation in their attitude to the Indians, who are at first their enemy but who, in time, they come to grudgingly and not uncomplicatedly admire. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. There’s a important moment early on when they see a group of ‘braves dressed in the finery of squaws’: This state of being, which is recognised today but would have seemed strange to Thomas’s peers, was nevertheless a category known to the Indians with whom Thomas and John spend time either fighting or fraternising. But it’s also, for Thomas, an introduction to cross-dressing, something that will play an important part in his future life, until he comes to the realisation that ‘I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days.’

This proves to be surprisingly innocent work, as the miners are wonderfully respectful, grateful for the chance to simply dance, even with fake women. As a soldier he is brave and fearless, but he has another side, one that emerges early when the two boys, virtually starving, are taken on to work in a mining-town saloon: their job, to dress as girls and dance for, and with, the customers. For a large part of the narrative Thomas is a soldier, fighting first in the Indian Wars and later in the Civil War, alongside his friend and lover John Cole. Set in the middle years of the nineteenth century, this is a strange, powerful, beautiful novel, which tells Thomas’s story from his adolescence through to his maturity. So writes the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s latest work, Thomas McNulty from Sligo, who travelled to America aged seventeen and signed up for the US Army.

I am thinking of the days without end of my life. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment.

Days without end review