Although The Newer World is certainly understandable as a stand-alone novel, it is probably best approached and appreciated as the third part of a trilogy. ... Strives to be more psychologically and emotionally complex than its precursors but ends up feeling significantly less sure-footed and coherent.
Part Bildungsroman, part picaresque ... It’s an astonishing effect, especially when you consider the near-miracles Barry performs with language. In his hands it attains registers that can only be described as soaring; a vertiginous high wire of prose.
Suffers from a peculiarly bloodless sense of composure in the face of historical outrage ... Confidently frictionless clemency ... To insist so floridly on your artistic liberty as a bulwark against tyranny, then use it simply to invent a survivor who invites us to reflect on slavery’s legacy by thinking, Oh, humanity: is that really what this great writer is ready to go to the gulag for?
It’s an enjoyable journey, and Barry is so good at the voice and the sentence-level details — every page has pleasures from top to tail — that it’s easy to overlook issues with the bigger picture ... Still, things do pick up and gain strong direction once Tennyson joins the army. There we get to the moral heart of the story.
The only moments when Tennyson doesn’t come off as a plausible narrator have nothing to do with race and simply concern Barry’s tendency to overindulge in fine writing. His prose style can be precious ... For the most part, his sentences glide at an elegant clip and, in under 260 pages, conjure an affecting sense of accumulated time.
Barry won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for a second time for Days Without End. But these books are more the heirs of Mark Twain and his denunciation of Walter Scott in Life on the Mississippi ... Time moves strangely in the disarming, dreamy trance of this novel ... Barry’s emphasis on Tennyson’s naivety and shock – on surviving a “life without information” – gives us a good, sad man caught in history’s undertow: a beautiful literary creation, but that same profile can read as a refusal to credit Tennyson with his own agency, uncomfortably close to the old lies that Reconstruction failed and that freedom dreams were both given and revoked by whites ... A Newer World felt somewhat vaporous on my first read, but actively resolute about irresolution on my second: Barry is concerned with 'aftermath' as something besides a name for devastation. The book thrums with memories of incomplete states, thinking about absolution, oblivion, reparation, affection.
Lyrically episodic ... Barry creates precise and stirring images that make the time and locations come alive, and the examination of what it means to be free creates excellent fodder for discussion.
