Reading Group: A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry

In February we met at Clare's to discuss this book of her suggestion. It is one of several novels by Barry about the McNultys and the Dunnes inspired by tales of his own Irish family history, and this book is a sequel to the prize-winning Days Without End. The earlier book features Thomas McNulty and John Cole, who meet in America as exiled young men and form a loving relationship while working as cross-dressing entertainers, but then join the US Army and are caught up in the violence of the Indian Wars and the American Civil War. A Thousand Moons takes place when they are much older, after the end of the civil war, but when the defeated confederates are agitating again. It is related by Winona, the young Native American woman the two men adopted as a child after the desecration of her tribe, the Lakota, in which they took part, and who has been brought up and educated by them tenderly and thoughtfully in a loving home. Caught between that old world of nature and the seasons and the world of structures and words (she works as a clerk for the local lawyer), Winona is both lost and saved - 'They both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way' and has thus the power to tell her own story in a prose that is both imbued with lyrical depictions of nature and straightforwardly colloquial.

Such paradoxes are at the heart of Barry's fiction, and what he is interested in are the complex subtleties and  fluidity of human nature and identity. His ability to ventriloquise a young Native American woman is a supreme case in point, though right at the start of the novel the colonisation of such an approach is acknowledged. 'I am Winona,' she begins the novel by saying, and then goes on to explain that this is not her original name, which was Ojinjintka (meaning 'rose'): the two men couldn't pronounce it, so they called her by her the name of her sister who was killed, Winona. In this way the men have culturally colonised her, but the naming is a remnant and thus acknowledgement of the genocide in which they took part and for which the way they have cared for her is an atonement.

Their household, composed of an ageing homosexual male couple, a young Native American woman and two freed black slaves, Rosalee and her brother Tennyson, is a microcosm of the blended, accepting society against which the factional world around them is set. That factional world soon encroaches: Winona is raped, possibly by Jas, the young white man who wants to marry her (in spite of social disapproval - 'I was just the cinders of an Indian fire in the eyes of the town'), and as the consequences of this unfold, Tennyson is attacked and left brain-damaged. Dressed as a boy for self-protection, Winona sets out on an aborted mission to avenge him, but in the process meets and falls in love with another young Native American woman. Eventually, Jas is found murdered and the innocent Winona is charged and sentenced to death, and the question of how this will end for her makes the final pages thrillingly tense. 

Like others in the group, I couldn't put this book down, and for me it was less for the plot than for Barry's wonderfully lyrical and astute prose, his empathy and insight into all of the characters. Even the most violent characters have their humane moments, providing a moving and unsettling portrayal of the complexity of human cruelty. As for the plot, we found the final revelation, like that in Barry's The Secret Scripture, manipulated and unconvincing, but again this did not spoil our overall admiration. There was only one dissenter: Ann, who surprised the rest of us by saying she hadn't engaged with the book at all, that she wouldn't have finished it if she hadn't had to for the meeting, and that she found it 'wordy'.

I did have one other caveat. The basic message of the book is that love conquers all. Much as I loved the book, and that message, in the light of Tommy Orange's There There which we read previously and which portrays the ongoing legacy of devastation in the lives of Native Americans to this day, I couldn't escape an uncomfortable feeling that to create this one (probably unusual) instance of atonement and redemption made the book potentially unrealistic, even possibly sentimental, and self-justifying. 

We ended with a discussion about the issue of cultural appropriation in fiction raised by this novel. We strongly felt that if it's done well, with respect and empathy, it is acceptable to step into the shoes of others whose experience is outside one's own. After all, the moral potential of fiction lies in its power as an act of empathy (which this book most supremely is). Speaking as someone who has written plays, I would also point out that it would be impossible for a playwright to write simply from their own experience and identity - a playwright just has to put themself in other people's shoes (and minds and emotions). And, as someone commented, if we stuck to our own experience in writing, historical novels couldn't be allowed: Hilary Mantel, after all, wasn't personally at the Tudor court, and her novels set there would have to be cancelled.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here