On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry - review

The Irish writer Sebastian Barry has form when it comes to plundering his own family history - and with it, Ireland's - for the stuff of his novels.

And this one is no exception. On Canaan's Side draws on his maternal great-grandfather, James Dunne, Catholic chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and overseer of Dublin Castle, centre of British rule in Ireland, during the troubled period of the Easter Rising and its aftermath.

Except that this story is about a daughter, Lily, who is engaged to a member of the Black and Tans, the notorious anti-republican force, and has to flee Ireland for America with the IRA on her trail. She is, like other Barry characters, on the wrong side of Irish history, an uncomfortable place to be. "I'm drawn to the past," he said in a recent interview. "It says more to me than the present."

It would be wrong to say that this is a novel in which nothing much happens. You'd have to be hard to please if you want more than assassination, rape and racism, marital desertion, suicide and intended suicide. Yet, oddly enough, what strikes the reader isn't so much that things happen, as a sense of atmosphere, a lyrical sensibility. Not to put too fine a point upon it, you don't read this author's novels to find out what happens next, because so much of it seems inconsequential or mildly implausible or happens offstage. What you do read it for is the beauty of the prose. That may or may not be enough to sustain you.

This is the account of an 89-year-old woman looking back at her life. She is contemplating suicide: "It is as if someone, some great agency, some CIA of the heavens knew well the little mechanism that I am, and how it is wrapped and fixed, and has the booklet or manual to undo me, and cog by cog and wire by wire is doing so, with no intention ever to put me back together again, and indifferent to the fact that all my pieces are being thrown down and lost".

The most moving part of the novel is its early, Irish part and the loving, childish view of grown-up matters. All too soon, however, the narrative moves to America. For Irish emigrants, this is the Promised Land, and the title comes from a negro spiritual. But Lily begins life there with tragedy and goes on to reap more of it. (The other thing you don't read Barry for is a happy ending.) Her first bereavement is a consequence of the Great War followed by the Irish war of independence; her final tragedy follows her American son's experience of Vietnam and her grandson's in the first Gulf War. "Four killing wars," she reflects, "with all those sons milled into them."

She comes to love America but early on she encounters another aspect of it, the condition of the country's black population. Yet curiously, it's hard to care much about the novel's American characters, apart, perhaps, from the friends who visit her in her loss. Her husband, son and grandson simply have less in the way of flesh and blood and sensibility than she does, perhaps precisely because they are American. Barry is simply less at home here.

As a story, On Canaan's Side isn't Barry's best; though it's quite good enough for the Booker longlist and may well go further. But for finely crafted writing, for the ability to convey atmosphere like a smell, there aren't many to better him.