But Barry’s business extends beyond intense and visceral description, though that persists through a narrative that eventually encompasses the American civil war as well as increasingly complex interactions with indigenous communities. It also captures the development of Thomas and John’s relationship, the men’s sexual attraction to one another announced early in the novel by the simple, paragraph-long sentence: 'And then we quietly fucked and then we slept.' What makes this strand of storyline unexpected is that it ushers in an exploration of gender fluidity and a redefinition of family that seems to scream anachronism but is nonetheless convincing ... In the years immediately before the civil war, America is shown as a country defined by lawlessness, ambition and plasticity; afterwards, it seems more hopelessly fractured, haunted by what has befallen it ... Days Without End is a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences are so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on. In its pages, Barry conjures a world in miniature, inward, quiet, sacred; and a world of spaces and borders so distant they can barely be imagined.

Days Without End is a haunting archaeology of youth, when 'time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending.' To the fatalism and carnage of classic westerns, Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant’s peculiar lilt and a proud boy’s humor. But in this country’s adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable ... It may seem incongruous to call a novel as violent as Days Without End dreamlike, but Barry’s narrator is a gentle witness to brutality: neither reluctant nor rabid, but a semi-willing instrument — which is to say, like most of those who participate in war ... With uncommon delicacy, Barry reminds us that individual humans buzz about the land like mosquitoes: causing mischief, dying, being born, forgetting. Our recompense comes in those private moments when 'love laughs at history a little.'”

...this is a busy novel: a bloody war saga that also happens to be a tale of forbidden love; a lament for those who perished during the Great Famine, and a paean to the vigor of the natural world ... [Barry] writes with intensity and confidence. No one can outdo Cormac McCarthy when it comes to evoking the feral, punishing nature of frontier life in the 19th century, but at times, Barry comes pretty close ... Days Without End spends much of its time on the Thomas-John relationship. These scenes are moving and tender ... Barry is expecting too much, however, when he asks the reader to accept a jarring plot turn that occurs in the novel’s first half: Thomas and John’s adoption of an Indian child. In an otherwise immaculately structured book, this is an egregious misstep considering the role Thomas and his fellow soldiers play in decimating the Indian population. The tone-deafness of this narrative development reduces the novel’s appeal, but Days Without End is still powerful and unsettling, an important look at one of history’s most regrettable chapters.

Days Without End is not only a story of survival, it is a love story, too, written in a gorgeous style that blends Barry’s characteristic eloquence with the straight-talk of early America. As such it sets itself firmly in the tradition of Irish diaspora writing — Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, and so many others ... As they make one hair’s breadth escape after another — with what, finally, seems like miraculous and indeed impossible luck — the reader must wonder at the nature of their blessed life; and whether the subtle author of this tale has perhaps conjured a dream on the other side of death.

I will say that tastes do differ, and some people may — and obviously do — like the sort of off-kilter imagery and down-home profundity that fill these pages ... In addition to supplying Thomas with such costive, gnomic observations, Barry has saddled him — Irish born and bred though he is — with a hokey, Old-West manner of speaking, the likes of which I have never heard outside of parody ... The previous McNulty novels have linguistic exuberance, but they are controlled works. Here Barry seems to be making everything up including Thomas’s portentous manner of speech.

...in spite of those horrors, Days Without End is suffused with joy and good spirit ... Through Barry, the frontiersman has a poet's sense of language. His thoughts on his sergeant's visible aging: 'Like we got 10 faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.' If you underlined every sentence in Days Without End that has a rustic beauty to it, you'd end up with a mighty stripy book.

The book provides Barry a way to parallel life for the underdogs — Native Americans in the U.S. and Irish in Ireland shared in common a perceived worthlessness from the ruling class, a pattern that will be repeated in the civil war ... Such are Barry’s lyrical skills that Thomas’s first killing of a cow buffalo sings with youthful ecstasy: 'the lovely orange flame shoots the bullet forth and the burning black steel is absorbed into her shoulder ... and it is very glorious and crazy the feeling' ... Bloody though this narrative frequently is, and brutal, it is loving, too, filled with the magic of the unexpected in sentences that ring with truth — things we’ve never read before but in Barry’s hands resound with wisdom.