Barry has found a wonderful speaking voice for Winona: lyrical, youthfully innocent, yet darkened by her memories and awareness of the genocidal destruction of her own people and their way of life ... Barry writes with the freshness and beauty of an early summer morning when the dew sparkles and the air shimmers with the promise of a glorious day. He is also a masterly craftsman, modulating the pace of his narrative, alternating vivid scenes of action with tranquil moments in which time seems to stand still ... his writing is better than ever. Days Without End and A Thousand Moons are equally marvellous; together, one of the finest achievements in contemporary fiction.
Had the story been told conventionally, as a third-person historical novel, it might have been thrilling enough, a dark drama of the postwar South to be set alongside To Kill a Mockingbird, and all the more striking because not written by a southern American author. It has a powerful plot (and is historically precise and carefully researched) ... a lyrical language celebrates...unorthodox love and their refuge of dance and music and ordinary domestic life, hidden inside 'the deep dangerous drama of the times.' But Winona’s narrative, to the novel’s benefit, mixes up rhapsody with plain, forthright speech ... compassion is the key to Sebastian Barry’s writing. If anything, there is almost too much of it here. Winona is a noble and pitiable victim, and doesn’t have the shaming blood-guilt of Thomas McNulty for his killing of her people, which makes Days Without End a more complicated and deeper book. For all that, A Thousand Moons is a brave and moving novel. Above all, it has a tender empathy with the natural world. This has always been one of Barry’s strengths. But here, in imagining a person divided between a way of life shaped by moon and sun, land and seasons and animals, and a culture of documents and letters and numbers, prisons and courtrooms, nature is felt with particular intensity.
If this novel isn’t as persuasive as Days Without End, it’s partly due to the eternal problem with sequels; the fresh action is overshadowed by what has come before, and there has to be quite a bit of explaining of backstory. Some characters – particularly Thomas and John – are handed down wholesale from the past, rather than made complex in new treatment ... We have it all through Winona’s telling, and she’s passionately invested in their goodness; it may be because he’s chosen a woman’s voice for his narration that Barry makes it at moments a little too sweet ... Mostly, however, the writing brings off Barry’s characteristic balancing act, between the lyrical telling that comes to him naturally and the grubby, tormenting world he wants to show us ... Barry’s prose always has this sturdy yet dreamy quality of a fairy story, even when he takes us into the darkest places of cruelty and violation – or perhaps especially when he takes us there. Because of something unguarded in his writing, and his idiom borrowed from ordinary speech and proverbial wisdom, we can trust him to touch the terrible stories from our collective past without betraying them, or turning them merely into clever art. His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present.
Barry handled scenes of McNulty and Cole cross-dressing in Days Without End immaculately; here, again, we understand the power conferred on Winona by her change in identity, the way she is suddenly able to move freely where she had previously been constrained. Her adventures take her on a journey that is horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure, all of it rendered in Barry’s uniquely lyrical prose, which seems at once effortless and dense with meaning ... This novel, like its predecessor, provides a compelling answer to those who claim that authors should stick to their own when it comes to telling stories. The idea of a middle-class white male writing in the voice of a cross-dressing teenage lesbian Native American might feel out of step with its times, but prose this good is a kind of enchantment, transcending the constructs that are supposed to define us to speak in a voice that is truly universal.
... vivid ... Along with memorable characters and a powerful story line, A Thousand Moons blends bygone language with rich imagery ... like its predecessor, this novel considers timeless ideas like tolerance and human rights. Taken together, these books stand as a sustained interrogation of this country’s founding ideas and myths ... Barry’s affection and respect for Winona is palpable. A Thousand Moons is a sincere and well-written novel starring an intrepid, self-sufficient heroine. We can never have too many of these.
...an unflinching portrait of the personal suffering that can accompany the birth pangs of a nation ... events are seen through Winona’s eyes, just as they were seen through McNulty’s in the earlier novel, and her voice has the same knack as his for noticing the accidental poetry of the everyday ... All of this makes the novel’s finale especially puzzling, a narrative climax that wouldn’t have been out of place in the rackety melodramas McNulty and Cole used to stage. But if this makes A Thousand Moons ultimately a less satisfying novel than Days Without End, it is still a page-turner with heart and soul. Towards the end, Winona confesses that what she most yearns for is 'the sacred stupidity of ordinary life', and that is what this novel provides by the bucketful. Like all of Barry’s best fiction, it examines life from an angle that makes it look as fresh as a new moon.
Is it possible for a male Irish author to channel the persona of a Native American woman? Of course; don’t be silly. Interestingly, the girl’s voice as narrator is fluent; when she talks, however, it’s in flawed English ... The narrative does grip you ... in the unravelling of the plot...the story seems weakest. Barry lays it on just too thick ... And there are other aspects of the book that grate: all the good people are outsiders ... And the moral, that love is all that matters, while no doubt true, seems here to have a polemical aspect ... But the massacres, the lynchings...the worthlessness of Indians under US law; that’s all true.
... forget the plot: it’s the writing that puts Barry on the side of the angels. It is vivid, lyrical and awash with metaphors and quasi-biblical proverbs ... The inner lives of the characters shine with a timeless quality ... Halfway through this novel I was so much under Barry’s spell I wanted to read everything he’d ever written. By the end? Why did I feel slightly over-charmed? And is there a word for that? Goddammit, Sebastian Barry will know it.
This is a less satisfying novel than its predecessor; it does not quite stand on its own. Its tricky plot lacks flow and sometimes feels over-engineered; when Winona falls for a wild and beautiful girl named Peg, their romance has the air of a decision made by the author rather than something organic and true ... The opening of the novel is a signal that Barry understands full well the challenges inherent in his decision to tell Winona’s story. This is a subtle, troubling novel, full of silences, full of pain ... Barry knows that it is too much to look for redemption in a story like Winona’s, but in his telling he shows that love offers at least a spark of hope.
Leaner and quieter than its antecedent, this sequel will please readers who found the earlier narrative exhaustingly rhapsodic, while admirers will welcome McNulty’s reappearance and the satisfying conclusion (perhaps) to his exploits ... It is, like most tragedies, a timeless drama of crime and retribution, enacted not on the battlefield this time but on a young woman’s body ... melodrama aside, A Thousand Moons is leavened with fewer adventures than Days Without End and more freighted with history and meaning. War’s aftershocks, Native American genocide, African-American slavery, not to mention gender fluidity: all of this Mr. Barry folds into Winona’s narrative with his customary skill. Yet past and present, which typically flow gracefully back and forth in Mr. Barry’s work, are somewhat awkwardly blended here ... Mr. Barry is at his best when he calls our attention to such details and resists the urge to soar. But in A Thousand Moons, as in his previous novel (though to a lesser degree), the vastness of the American territory seems to arouse a linguistic wildness that no Wicklow glen could ever inspire ... This novel of intermittent grace and unfailing compassion finally skids to a frantic denouement that leaves us hoping for Mr. Barry’s return, in coming works, to a smaller place and calmer times.
Winona’s memory lapse is almost too handy for Barry ... frustration is compensated for by the sense of threat the mystery generates, but when the reveal comes, it is too pat—unsurprising in its substance, improbable in its disclosure ... This is a lesser book than Days Without End—a less ambitious story, but also a more constrained piece of prose. In McNulty, the ventriloquist Barry seemed to find his perfect dummy ... Writing as [Winona], Barry has hampered himself. He only lets rip in the passages where she is thinking back to her Lakota origins, and when he does so his lyricism feels formulaic, even sentimental. Only when she speaks of love does the writing in this book achieve full power. A Thousand Moons reprises, with variations, the theme of sexual indeterminacy so delicately and boldly announced in its prequel. Winona, like McNulty, likes to cross-dress, and like him she falls in love with a member of her own sex. Where McNulty was laconic about his devotion to John Cole, Winona, watching them, speaks eloquently of their mutual tenderness, and when she writes about Peg, the other Indian girl she falls for, there is a lovely gauc
One of Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary gifts as a writer is his boundless capacity for empathy, for inhabiting the skin, nerves and mouths of characters the river of history tends to wash away ... The protagonist and speaker of his newest novel...might be one of the most lost, the most eroded into the dust of history, a decision that will raise pressing questions about the politics of representation, though Barry treats his subject with sensitivity and nuance ... Winona’s act of writing, of claiming a narrative, is one of the ways she wrests control over her circumstances, a theme that runs through Barry’s work. A Thousand Moons is a novel about weaving a voice, story, and self out of the shards of a language that is both inadequate to and elastic enough to meet the enormity of living.
Irish writer Barry continues the story begun in Days Without End...revisiting Civil War vets Thomas McNulty and John Cole and their adopted Sioux daughter, Winona, a decade later. Narrated by Winona, this beautifully rendered historical bildungsroman is equal parts thrilling and meditative.
...[a] mournful sequel ... Barry has created a vivid if didactic heroine ('Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don’t see the single souls'). This earnest tale will stay with readers.
