The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
August 1998

In his gloriously poetic and deeply moving first novel, acclaimed playwright Sebastian Barry charts the star-crossed career of Eneas McNulty, a peripatetic Irish everyman who survives the First World War only to become a living casualty of Ireland's struggle for independence. Cast out of the political book of life and condemned "upon pain of death" to spend his days in exile, Barry's eponymous narrator travels the world from Galveston to Dunkirk, from Nigeria to the remote Isle of Dogs, hounded by IRA assassins and the irresistible siren song of his homeland.

Eneas is born with the century, a few generations too late to inherit the position and respectability of his namesake, a well-to-do Sligo butter exporter. His father sews clothing for the madmen at the local lunatic asylum and on the weekends plays music in a small dance-hall orchestra; his mother, though burdened with a secret shame, is a "dixie" of a dancer who turns jigs on the hearthstone for her son's amusement. Despite the family's pinched circumstances, Eneas escapes the brunt of the now-infamous miserable Irish Catholic childhood and grows to a gentle, if slightly oblivious, adolescence in the company of the "captain of his boyhood," Jonno Lynch.

Eneas first earns Jonno's friendship with a well-timed word of warning that allows Jonno and his wild boys to escape the wrath of the local Presbyterian rector, whose orchard they were plundering. For an all-too-brief season of mischief-making and welcome camaraderie, Eneas finds acceptance among the gang. ("No treasure in life beyond pals," hisfathertells him, words that will echo poignantly in the years to come.) But Jonno, an orphan who has spent his childhood in the cold embrace of foster care, goes "serious on the world" at a young age and gradually leaves Eneas behind as he ventures out in search of "shillings and employments." Abandoned, and feeling something of the unexplainable attraction the men of Sligo have always held for the land of France, Eneas enlists to fight in the European war. But due to his age and the lateness of his decision, the closest he ever gets to striking a blow for France is service aboard a British Merchant Navy vessel assigned to the port of Galveston, Texas.

At war's end he comes home with the thought of patching the "rip in his head where Jonno Lynch's friendship once was," but Jonno has allied himself with the republican cause and can no longer afford to be seen with any eejit simple enough to fight for the hated English. Nor can Eneas find "a niche in the world of Sligo to slot himself back into — not just a niche for living, but a niche of time itself." Desperate for work, Eneas naively worsens his position by accepting the smart black uniform of the Royal Irish Constabulary at a time when the word "royal" is as welcome on an Irish tongue as "ordure." Barry's perhaps surprisingly evenhanded portrayal of the reviled Black and Tans ("many an Irish family was reared on those wages, and many a peeler was a straightforward decent man") reflects one of the central themes of his acclaimed theatrical productions — that of "trying to tell the stories of those who had been allowed to fall into silence or over whom, for what ever reason social or political, a cloth of silence had been thrown." And Barry should know: His own great-grandfather — who served as the model for Thomas Dunne in Barry's play "The Steward of Christendom" — served in the Dublin Metropolitan Police during the Irish Rebellion.

For months the only police action that occupies Eneas is the daily carting away of the bodies offered upon the altar of Irish independence. But after witnessing the cold-blooded murder of a fellow officer and being implicated in the savage reprisals carried out by the hated Auxiliary Force, Eneas is cashiered from the RIC for his own health. Back home in Sligo, the IRA sends none other than Jonno Lynch to give Eneas the opportunity to clear his name. All that is required of him is one simple act of murder, a token of good faith, the fabled opportunity to die for Ireland. "This is a grand thing," Jonno tells him, "this is like Cuchullain and the like, you know, and Ferdia, and fighting, and Ireland, and freedom." Eneas, now an old man at the age of 22, declines this honor, though the alternative is banishment upon pain of death. If murder is the price of citizenship in the new Irish state, then he is truly a man without a country. In a prescient moment, Eneas understands that "surely, just the same as England, this useless war will take away all the good young men, or the hardiest, and leave only the astutest killers. Those that have stalked most expertly, murdered most adroitly, the very dancing men of murder."

Eneas's long years of exile begin with a stint on a North Sea fishing trawler; then, with the onset of the Second World War, he is given a second chance to fight for France. Miraculously delivered from the maelstrom on the beach at Dunkirk, he passes the rest of the war in the ruined vineyards of an addled old Frenchman, literally harvesting the grapes of wrath. A brief visit to Sligo at war's end is sufficient to confirm that his death sentence still stands, and once again, Eneas sets out just ahead of the dire men in the long black coats, this time to dig irrigation ditches in Nigeria. There he meets a kindred soul in Harcourt, the son of a blind piano tuner and a man of education and cultivated tastes. During the war, Harcourt was stationed in Dublin as part of British military intelligence. But upon his return to his native Nigeria he finds that Lagos, too, is full of men who want "that big thing you have in your sweet country, and I'm talking about independence. And those sort of men don't like my father's sort and they don't like me. Death-threats are all the fashion in Lagos, let me tell you."

Lagos, Sligo — Harcourt casually remarks that they are simply permutations of the same word — a coincidence, perhaps, but ominous nonetheless. Whether in the Balkan states or Ireland, Nigeria or Southeast Asia, the old colonial regimes are toppling in a worldwide convulsion of nationalism. The reader gets the distinct impression that Barry has weighed the human cost of modern nation-building in the balance and found it a poor bargain. Ultimately, nations, states, and political factions have no demarcation in Eneas's atlas of the heart; human relationships, such as the lifelong friendship Eneas forms with Harcourt, are all that constitutes "home."

Aoibheann Sweeney

. . .Barry's sweet, lyrical pitch never falters; the novel has a bold measure of old-fashioned blessedness. . . .Barry vividly creates Eneas' warm humanity. . . .[his] happy childhood provides a momentary glimpse at the stark, troubling contours of Ireland's somber history.
—New York Times Book Review

Thomas Flanagan

...a wonderfully strange book by a fine writer—too ambitious, perhaps, at times too portentous about history and Ireland, but in these times ambition is too rare to require apology.
— New York Review of Books

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Known in England as a playwright ('The Steward of Christendom'), novelist and poet, Barry brings all the attendant skills to this stunning novel, with its evergreen theme of the parallels between a personal life and the political life of a country -- in this case the fiery history of 20th century Ireland. Eneas McNulty is born in 1900 in Sligo, the eldest child of a dancing mother and a musician father. By the age of 10, he has forged a magnetic bond with his chum Jonno Lynch, an orphan and Eneas' lifelong opposite. WWI is the pivotal event in Eneas' life; he loses his footing and never regains it. Driven by a vague dream of fighting in French fields, he enlists in the British Merchant Navy and finds himself in Galveston, Texas, hauling machine parts. He returns home to find post-war Ireland in political turmoil and economic dire straits. Jonno, who has devoted himself to the 'world of shillings and employment,' won't acknowledge Eneas because of his connection to the British. After a jobless year, he signs up with the Royal Irish Constabulary, which cements the community's conviction that he's a British loyalist. To take his name off the 'black list,' Jonno and his crowd demand that Eneas become an assassin against the RIC. While Eneas doesn't fear his own death, he can't kill anyone else. And so his permanent exile begins. He works as a herring fisherman in the North Atlantic, joins the British army for WWII, digs a canal in Nigeria, opens a hotel for homeless veterans in London's Isle of Dogs. Eneas is in many ways an Everyman in this century of the migrant and the dispossessed, but Barry is careful to intersperse flashes of humor as well as moments of bone-deep longing in his protagonist's bleak odyssey. Work and the rare moments of fellow-feeling it produces are Eneas' solace as even his memories of home are salted with the menace of the men who've vowed to hunt him down. Barry's lyric prose, astute use of detail and poignant insight are a fit match for his tragic theme of an innocent buffeted by history.

Library Journal

Irish author Barry, perhaps best known on this side of the Atlantic as a playwright, brings beautiful and poetic language to bear on a painful and unsettling part of Irish history. Eneas McNulty, a Sligoman, sets out at a tender age to save France at the outbreak of World War I. After spending the war with the British Merchant Navy, he returns to Sligo, joining the Royal Irish Constabulary at a time when Ireland has begun to fight for independence. Eneas is tragically apolitical, but his presence in the Constabulary is noted by Sligo rebels and in particular by his boyhood friend Jonno Lynch. He is offered a chance to remove himself from the rebels' blacklist but at the price of becoming an assassin. When he refuses, he must flee, and so begins his life of wandering--through England, France, and Africa. His thoughts of home never desert him, but neither does the specter of the men in dark coats who have placed him under a death sentence..-- Dianna Moeller, WLN, Lacey, Washington

Aoibheann Sweeney

The New Yorker

The eponymous hero of this novel is an Irish odd man out. Born into pinched, eccentric circumstances in Sligo, at the turn of the century, Eneas innocently enlists in the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Troubles and becomes a marked man for life. Pursued by his best friend turned I.R.A. enforcer, he finds nomadic work as a herring fisherman in Scotland, a volunteer soldier at the retreat through Dunkirk, a canal digger in postcolonial Nigeria, and, finally, as the proprietor of a doss-house for homeless men on the Isle of Dogs. Although Eneas will leave no trace on the record of the century, he grown into an unforgettable Everyman, thanks to Barry's fine bardic voice, which is tinctured with humor and compassion.

Kirkus Reviews

Another Irishman's reimagining of classical epics some 75 years after Joyce's Ulysses gives impressive depth and pathos to this first novel from the versatile writer best known for his recent play 'The Steward of Christendom.' Barry's eponymous hero is 'exiled' from his home in Sligo when a passion for the culture of his beloved France inspires him to enlist in the British Merchant Navy (in 1916). But Eneas is shipped instead to Galveston, Texas, and his disillusionment increases when he returns to Sligo to a traitor's welcome. Making matters worse, he joins the Royal Irish Constabulary and is subsequently marked for execution by his homeland's revolutionaries, one of whom—his boyhood friend Jonno Lynch—dedicates himself to pursuing the vagrant Eneas. The elusive wanderer's travels then take him to England, France at last (where he literally labors in vineyards), furtively back home to visit his subdued (though still loving) parents and sister Teasy (now a cloistered nun), and, most interestingly, to Nigeria as another World War looms. But Lagos, as Eneas ruefully notes, a near anagram of Sligo is also haunted by 'Deathly, killing, seducing politics,' though there is the lifelong friendship Eneas forms with Harcourt, an epileptic native Nigerian with whom he'll eventually be reunited when at last, in his 70th year, he returns to Sligo to await the carrying-out of the sentence pronounced on him decades before.

Eneas' story, which climaxes with a surprising fulfillment of the violent fate he has long expected, is crowned by a complex and honestly earned vision of 'redemption.' And Barry tells it in a gorgeous, mellifluous rush of passionate language that often alludesspecifically to Virgil's Aeneid (it's especially tempting to view Harcourt as a male counterpart of Aeneas' beloved Carthaginian queen Dido) while accommodating both magnificent invective ('You low dog on all fours, you poor fighting pup with your tail bitten off by a tinker at birth') and sorrowfully lyrical meditations on the ruin of Eneas' country and people. One of the best novels out of Ireland in many a year.