By now, the Irish fascination with the American frontier could almost be classed as its own genre. From Rory Gallagher’s Out on the Western Plain to Kevin Barry\u2019s The Heart in Winter, something about the expansiveness of the West must speak to an innately Irish sense of yearning.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it has to do with the centuries of oppression which Irish people experienced under the yoke of British colonialism. Perhaps it finds its roots in the waves of emigration which started during the Famine and continue to this day.<\/p>\n
“\u2026 Every Irish person was an expert on [starvation],” as Sebastian Barry\u2019s protagonist puts it in his latest novel The Newer World. “About that he said nothing more.”<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, we know that when our ancestors first started landing on American shores, their dreams of a better life didn\u2019t always materialise. During the 1860s, for example, Irish men were drafted by their thousands \u2013 often just after their ships had docked \u2013 and sent off to die in a civil war they couldn\u2019t possibly have known anything about.<\/p>\n
By now, the Irish fascination with the American frontier could almost be classed as its own genre.<\/p>\n
Harsh as this treatment of Irish people was, it pales in comparison to the transatlantic slave trade, over which the American Civil War was fought and which is estimated to have enslaved around 12.5 million people over three centuries. It\u2019s against this backdrop that The Newer World takes place, following the travails of freed slave Tennyson Bouguereau as he tries to survive the so-called Reconstruction era in post-War Tennessee.<\/p>\n
The book also completes a triptych started by Barry in 2016 with Days Without End and which he continued in 2020 with A Thousand Moons. The difference here is that The Newer World is narrated by an African American character, and there are perhaps some legitimate questions to be asked about the ethics of a white author ventriloquising the historical pain of chattel slavery.<\/p>\n
“Why I was ever surprised at the cruelty of people, I don’t know,” Tennyson says at one point. “Doesn\u2019t it go with the territory of being this half-boiled thing called a human being?”<\/p>\n