The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry
It is a long time before he reappears as himself, if he ever does. In the meantime he is crossing the poor sea to England on a cheap ticket in the cattle boat, so called as a measure of the comfort and dignity afforded the emigrants thereon. He has suffered privately, severely, on the late train out of Sligo across Ireland, but despite everything he said goodbye fleetingly to his siblings, getting an unexpected kiss and prayer from Teasy, impregnable and absolute with her fourteen years. The kiss of his Mam and the different kiss of his Pappy both were similar sparks on his face, smouldering there he suspects with eternal intent, and even Young Tom and Jack embraced him uncharacteristically, all angles and bones – at close of day and end of all their own eldest brother. And there was a class of shriving in that moment of leaving, simplifying, a feeling he would have liked to carry with him at least as far as the blowing lights of the station. But it was not to be. In the carriage he dwindled like a spud fallen and forgotten behind the kitchen press. He talked at himself all night, the mails and parcels jostling in the secure van behind him.
Eneas McNulty is born in Sligo, Ireland, in 1901. He is a dreamy and quiet boy, conflict averse and apt to take the road of least resistance. He is without politics in a country growing consumed with political violence. The easy way out, after returning from the British navy at the end of World War I, is to take the best and only job available to him – in the Royal Irish Constabulary.
It is a mark of Barry’s skill, and the absorbing music of his prose, that we accept that a young man in Ireland at that time could more or less accidentally join the RIC and therefore make himself the mortal enemy of his erstwhile friends – most pointedly, the very political and violent Jonno Lynch. But we do accept that such a fateful decision is taken on a desperate whim, without thought of the consequences. That suspension of disbelief allows us to follow Eneas in his lifelong quest to avoid the death sentence imposed upon him as a traitor by Jonno and Mr. O’Dowd.
He is forced to leave the woman, Vivienne, who he has been steadily falling in love with (and who also seems unfazed by his involvement with what was widely recognized as an occupying force). We travel with Eneas to a shrimping colony in Galveston, Texas, a fishing village in the north of Scotland, to France in the disastrous Dunkirk landing at the start of World War II and to several places in Africa. While we learn a bit about these various spots, most of what we learn is that they are not Sligo, not home. Eneas adjusts as someone of his passivity always will, letting years go by in bunches while forming only one significant relationship – with an African man named Harcourt. He seems to spend the bulk of his time missing his home and family or trying hard not to miss his home and family.
He does return to Sligo just twice. First after about 20 years, just after being rescued from the Dunkirk beaches. He hopes that after 20 years, the grudges of the long-finished civil war will be forgotten, but receives a letter warning him to leave and after only a few days – long enough to check in on the happiness and unhappiness of his siblings and to sleep with his brother’s tragic first wife – he is chased by a gang of men in black coats sent to carry out the death sentence and must exile himself from home once more. His second return to Sligo is after 40 years. He is an old man, but is enough unchanged that Jonno Lynch recognizes him in the airport and the two reminisce about their pre-civil war friendship until Jonno has to admit that, yes, the death sentence is still in effect. So Eneas is off again.
He spends the end of the novel in London, running a cheap hotel for wanderers with his friend Harcourt.
It is a fascinating life and the character of Eneas is an excellent, poetic sort of a tour guide. Barry’s language is musical and thick as he muses over things like love and ambition and anger and longing. Eneas remains generally unengaged with whatever life he is living at the moment – even when he is relatively stable, as when he is a fisherman, he is more surviving than really living. It is his emotional life, his constant wondering what other life he might have lived except for the early death penalty that gives the novel its considerable energy. There is a certain kind of existentialist trope here – Eneas lives on the edge of the void, seeing in very concrete ways how his life has been robbed of meaning. However, just as Barry demythologizes the Irish revolution (so full of glory in Yeats, O’Flaherty and others) his version of the existential void is dirty and lonely. There is never much doubt that Eneas has been robbed of something real and important. Despite the Waiting for Godot aspects of this world, it becomes clear to Eneas, and the reader, that ordinary real life can have tremendous meaning. Eneas sees when he spies on his brother reading a picture book to his children, a simple scene of domestic connection that he returns to repeatedly.
The failing of the book is in its attempt to let Eneas carve out a little of that meaning for himself in the relationship with Harcourt. Though Harcourt is an entertaining character, he is never much more than entertaining. Despite the fact that Eneas spends ten years in constant companionship with him and that both men profess an deep and abiding friendship and love for one another, Harcourt is not deeply drawn. Harcourt is more spontaneous and upbeat than Eneas and that his background reinforces the Irishmen’s relationship to politics, but he remains more plot and thematic device than character. Part of this is his voice – the narrator’s voice is thick with Irish colloquial diction and rhythm. This makes the narrator a worthy voice for Eneas’s inner life, but renders Harcourt as a kind of mini-Eneas. He is a Nigerian, from Lagos and while he is educated by Irish missionaries, there is no reason to have denied him his own lilting slang.
Eneas’s relationship to women is also shallow. This is partly an issue of Barry’s conception of Irish society. In this world, Eneas is not the only life pushed into exile. His younger sister, Teasy, is forced into a convent and, while she does not complain, it is clear to the reader that her life is wasted. Eneas has a deep and interesting relationship with Vivien, his pre-exile girlfriend, and her passion for him and her hurt at his leaving are palpable and real. One would think that Barry had little choice but to write her out of the book, since she must move on without Eneas. But when he is back at the age of forty, he takes an immediate passionate and sympathetic interest in Roseanne – his brother Tom’s wife at the time, who has herself been exiled from the family. We are given to believe that her supposed mental illness may be related to an independent sexuality, but she, too remains little more than a sketch - another life that is cast aside by this society. She is clearly a stand-in for Vivien – both thematically and in Eneas’s actual affections, but the entire idea could have been more powerful if we had followed Vivien’s life rather than replacing her. And while we are thankful that Eneas does not yield to temptations in the various red-light districts he encounters, he and Barry seem to be simply avoiding women in ways that hamper the novel’s realism and miss opportunities to deepen Eneas’s character.
Of course, this is Eneas’s story and there really is no other character necessary. Through loneliness, he forges a self that is real and giving. His final sacrifice is a profound act of redemption and forgiveness as the anger and confusion of politics finally gives way to an act of human compassion. Barry has created a world where the striving for freedom is itself oppressive but humans are able to step outside of community for real connection.
Barry’s work seems to be part of a trend – Jez Buzzworth’s The Ferryman on Broadway last year, Anna Burn’s novel Milkman, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction Say Nothingall looked at the inhumanity of Irish political violence and found more humane and grace-full lives outside of the sects that tore Ireland in the 20th Century. I hope it is a trend that reality can learn from.
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