Sunday Night Book Excerpt: Sebastian Barry

From: A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry

And those boys of Europe, born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish-and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest--their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death's amusement, flung on the might scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.

Ah, I have just started what will no doubt be a deeply wonderful and painful book. It's fiction, but drawn from the history of the Irish soldiers fighting under the British crown during WWI. The text above just tore through me as a mother, but also as a military wife, and as a human being. Barry clearly has a poetic gift. Although it is a very dark book, he handles the subject matter with such poetic fluidity that it's the prose equivalent of melted butter. (I hope you were able to read the excerpt to the end without the distractions of the links; I just thought that including some links would be great for "further study.")

I met Barry at a book reading held at the Embassy. He read from this novel and several other works. (I love that I can hear his voice now when I read A Long, Long Way.) Part of my work leading up to the reading was to research his writing and prepare notes for an introductory speech by the Political Counsellor (the host of the event.) I will try to scare up part of the speech that I composed, at least the first paragraph because I am really proud of it. But, for now, I've included an excerpt of a interview that I came across during my research that spoke to me.

Excerpt from an interview with Sebastian Barry


Interviewer: Since this novel asks such important questions about how people learn and what they believe, could you speak about the violence occurring in the world today? Do you see any way we might begin to get beyond war?

SB: I am sure, like many people, I did naïvely hope that this century would be that long-prepared-for century without war. In matters of violence I am a Tutu-ist, as in Bishop Tutu of South Africa, whose thesis seems to be that there is no terrible action that a person can commit that he the good bishop in other circumstances might not also have committed. It is an astonishingly generous, almost bewilderingly wise stance, but it prevents a person from putting himself in superior judgment over another. A man who cannot be offended and cannot think himself superior cannot start a war. If, as George Bernard Shaw said, "Youth is wasted on the young," age is wasted on the aged if the only answer to the long question of human belligerence is belligerence. So I am hoping like many another mortal, like many another father, that a new answer is imminent. I am more than willing to hope naïvely.

I think this is why at some point in my life I want to dedicate my time to working with old people. I want to interview them and hear their stories. Maybe we can use that cumulative wisdom to help ourselves from repeating our mistakes? Although there are fifty eleven million biographies and history books out there, I don't think we can ever have enough human stories.