12 ★ FT Weekend 21 March/22 March 2020he has come to realise that “it takes an
immense and often-unnoticed-by-men
courage just to be a woman in the world.”
As the plot unfolds, Winona begins a
relationship with a feisty Native Ameri-
can girl called Peg. Inspired by his son
Toby, whose coming-out during the
writing ofDays Without End eshaped ther
story, Barry is an outspoken advocate of
LGBT rights. By imagining a realm in
which Thomas and John lived their sex-
uality freely on the frontier, Barry hoped
to cast a protective spell around his son.But Winona’srelationship was not
planned, he says. The character of Peg
just showed up in his workroom one day,
“falling out of the bushes” when Winona
is at the river. “I didn’t know who she
was or anything. But I knew she was one
of the six or seven most important
women I would ever know in my life.”
While his earlier novels were narrated
in the third person, bothDays Without
End nda A Thousand Moons re told bya
their protagonists. “My suspicion has
always been... thatcharacter and
experience and memory are somehow
embedded into the DNA of the sen-
tences, in the syntax itself,” says Barry.
With debate about cultural appropri-
ation raging in the wake of eanine Cum-J
mins’ recent novelAmerican Dirt, how
did he feel about voicing a young Native
American woman? It is the impossibility
of the undertaking itself that is an impe-
tus for an author of historical fiction “to
try to imagine as best, as completely, as
you can,” Barry says. The book’s title is
drawn from Winona’s mother’s “deepest
measure of time”. “For my mother timewas a kind of a hoop or a circle, not a long
string,” Winona recalls. “If you walked
far enough... you could find the people
still living who had lived in the long ago.
‘A thousand moons all at once’, she
called it.”
Barry is now in the last year of his
three-year term as Laureate for Irish
Fiction. Inspired by the reception to a
performance ofOn Blueberry Hillin
Mountjoy Prison, the setting of the play,
Barry has used his platform to launch
book clubs in mental institutions, to
serve individuals who were “being put
beyond the reach of life”. What’s next,
then, for the 64-year-old author?Barry
is “desperate to write a third book”,
about Tennyson, the freed slave. After
being brutally attacked inA Thousand
Moons, Tennyson is rendered mute, una-
ble to name the assailant.
Barry is drawn to Tennyson’s tale
because of a childhood friendship with a
boy with a Ghanaian father and Irish
mother. Having previously attended a
more diverse school in London, Barry
didn’t think anything of it, but his friend
suffered at the hands of their classmates
in Ireland. “The whole realm of preju-
dice is such a powerful, vicious virus,”
Barry says. “When you touch it, or put it
under the microscope, there’s nothing
there. And yet it has this huge, foment-
ing, murderous power.” A book, he adds,
“is trying to be a vaccine, so that you put
something into the bloodstream of the
culture which cures.”Interview How did Sebastian Barry follow up his|
prizewinning ‘Days Without End’?Mia Levitin sksa
him about female voices and cultural appropriation
Sebastian Barry, photographed
for the FT in London last week
by Greg Funnellher brother Tennyson — is disrupted
when Winona is attacked and raped.
Justice is unlikely: considered a prisoner
of war, “she actually doesn’t have citi-
zenship, so she doesn’t have any rights”,
Barry says, his eyes welling up. The
character of Winona is “bound up with
my own passionate observation of my
daughters,” he says. “She is as much a
daughter to me as any daughter could
be.” Having observed the “little and
large violences brought on even now on
women” through the lens of fatherhood,A
fter debating which ges-
ture,virusoblige, is meant to
replace the handshake (an
elbow-bump? a Vulcan
salute?), I sit down with
Sebastian Barry to discuss his new book
A Thousand Moons. Barry is in London
for the opening of his playOn Blueberry
Hill, slated for an eight-week West End
run at the time of our meeting but since
suspended due to widespread theatre
closures. Given that it took 10 years to
complete the play, he says, how strange
that the fates should have his two
releases coincide.
A Thousand Moons, Barry’s eighth
novel, picks up the thread of the story of
Days Without End, the Western with a
twist that won the 2016 Costa Book of
the Year, making Barry the first novelist
to win the overall award twice. He is
reluctant to callA Thousand Moonsa
sequel, worried that the word implies “a
bit of a low undertaking”.
Days Without End s narrated by Tho-i
mas McNulty, an Irishman who emi-
grates to America in the 1850s after los-
ing his family to famine. The kernel of
the character came from a great-great-
uncle “whose only remnant legend was
that he’d been out at the ‘Indian Wars’,
which of course, when I was a child,
sounded kind of wonderful,” Barry con-
fesses. McNulty hitches his wagon toLike one of
the family
W
hy shouldn’t crime nov-
els tackle such content-
ious issues as race, reli-
gion and online radical-
isation head-on? After
all, cogent points about society can be
made in a popular medium that will
reach a greater number of readers than
most literary novels.
A real-life violent incident in Quebec
gave Ausma Zehanat Khan the basis of
her new novelA Deadly Divide No Exit(
Press, £8.99). In Khan’s narrative, a
mass shooting in a mosque near Ottawa
becomes a very pressing matter for
Pakistani-Canadian detective Esa Khat-
tak and his partner Sgt Rachel Getty,
particularly with the influence of a
rightwing shock jock and an incendiary
nationalist group stirring up hatred —
not to mention the racist local police.
Khattak first appeared in Khan’s pow-
erful novelThe Unquiet Dead, and the
author’s background in international
human rights law provides strong
underpinnings. But this is not a social
document — it is a page-turner. Khan’s
acutely realised protagonists are never
idealised but always deeply human.
James Oswald demonstrated his com-
mand of the contemporary crime novel
withNatural Causes, the first entry in his
Edinburgh-set series featuring tough
copper Tony McLean. Dalliances with
the macabre and the occult have
marked Oswald’s subsequent work, as
inBury Them Deep Wildfire, £16.99).(
McLean has been shunted into an unful-
filling managerial role when his coll-
eague Anya Renfrew disappears. Anya
was, it transpires, a woman with a tan-
gled private life. And when her burnt-
out car is discovered in an area rife with
sinister folklore (dating back to the can-
nibalistic Sawney Bean clan), we’re soon
in typically scarifying Oswald territory.
If the perceived inequities of the male
sex are to be the focus of many modern
crime novels, then at least it’s good to
know that writers as nuanced and com-
plex as Eva Dolan are tackling “toxic
masculinity”. In the weightyBetween
Two Evils Raven, £12.99), a doctor has(
been beaten to death with a table leg.
The dead man worked at a controversial
female immigrant removal centre in
Cambridgeshire — but it is unclearwhether he was uncovering abuse of the
women or was himself part of a corrupt
establishment. Detectives Mel Ferreira
and Dushan Zigic have been cut loose
from the Hate Crimes Unit, but the case
falls into their remit. They also have to
confront a psychopathic serial rapist
who has been released on a legal techni-
cality, and the law may have to be
twisted to bring about a semblance of
justice. With a variety of other issues on
board, this is a real state-of-the-nationnovel, with taxing social problems
treated with the rigour we have come to
expect from Dolan.
American writer Gregg Hurwitz is
nothing if not eclectic. A fiercely articu-
late defender of intellectual freedoms in
an era of “no-platforming”, he is a suc-
cessful screenwriter in Los Angeles and
a writer of comics who has had Batman
listening to the piano music of Ravel.
But it is in his eventful novels that he
truly shines, bringing intelligence and
complexity to his mayhem-filled sagas.
Into the Fire Michael Joseph, £12.99) is(
the fifth novel featuring Evan Smoak
(also known as “Orphan X”), who is
caught up in a money-laundering racketin Los Angeles after an accountant and a
reporter are murdered. A flash drive
containing incriminating spreadsheets
is delivered to Max Merriweather by his
cousin — now dead — and Max involves
a reluctant Evan, placing them both in
mortal danger. Not, perhaps, Hurwitz’s
best work, but the set pieces here — and
they are plentiful — bristle with the cine-
matic panache one might expect from a
writer of film scenarios. Jacket encomi-
ums from the likes of Lee Child and
James Patterson are ten a penny these
days, but they are justified here — not
least for the (literally) explosive finale.
InThe Lantern Menby Elly Griffiths
(Quercus, £18.99) Ruth Galloway has
abandoned her role as Norfolk’s resi-
dent forensic archaeologist. Adjusting
to a new job, she finds her name invoked
by a convicted murderer who offers to
show where his various victims are bur-
ied — provided Galloway does the exhu-
mation. The hidden graves are near a
village famous for the “Lantern Men”,
sinister apparitions who lure hapless
visitors to their destruction. The novel is
a reminder of just how skilful Griffiths’
writing is — and how her Galloway
books always deliver the goods.
Now what happens when you put two
of the most distinguished writers of Nor-
dic noir in tandem?Death Deserved
by Thomas Enger and Jorn Lier Horst
(Orenda, £8.99, translated by Anne
Bruce) suggests it was a propitious pub-
lishing move; a ruthless killer is pursued
by a tenacious celebrity blogger and a
damaged detective. Similarly Scandi-
navian isBlack River Point Blank,(
£14.99), though its writer Will Dean is
British,albeit living in Sweden. His
uncompromising reporter Tuva Mood-
yson is searching for her missing best
friend Tammy. A stygian pine forest and
the shortest night of the year are ingre-
dients in a peerless exercise in suspense.
Finally, Sarah Pinborough’s edgy
Dead to Her HarperCollins, £12.99)(
has her heroine — in a relationship with
a wealthy man — using extreme meas-
ures when a rival threatens her security.
The “woman scorned” theme is deliv-
ered with considerable élan.Barry Forshaw’s latest book is
‘Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide’State-of-the-nation suspense
“Handsome John Cole”, a boy whom he
meets in Missouri. After a stint perform-
ing in drag in a mining town saloon, the
two teenagers join the army, fighting
against First Nation tribes and then in
the civil war. The nature of their rela-
tionship is confirmed simply: “And then
we quietly f**ked and then we slept.”
Part of Barry’s joy in creating a con-
stellation of books around the fictional
McNulty and Dunne families over the
past 20-plus years has been the oppor-
tunity to recount some of the same
events from different points of view. “All
these books are doing something that
my family sometimes didn’t do: they’re
talking to each other,” he says.
InA Thousand Moons, Winona, a
Lakota orphan who was adopted by
Thomas and John as a girl inDays With-
out End, takes the talking stick. Winona
comes into the couple’s care after their
platoon massacres her family and tribe.
“What does it mean when another peo-
ple judge you to be worth so little you
were only to be killed?” she wonders.
Now a young woman, she has to come to
terms with her adoptive parents’
involvement in the carnage: “They both
gave me the wound and healed it, which
is a hard fact in its way.”
The peaceful postwar Tennessee farm
life of this makeshift family —which
includes a freed slave called Rosalee and‘It takes an immense
and often-unnoticed-by-
men courage just to bea woman in the world’
Books
A stygian pine forest
and the shortest night
of the year are ingredientsin a peerless exercise in
Nordic noir suspenseGENRE ROUND-UP
CRIME
ByBarryForshaw
MARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 17:37 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD12, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 12, 1