The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

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Sebastian Barry is a conjurer, and he conjures up Ireland, the chaos of the Irish question and the impossibility of living an unpolitical life while suspended between the English and the IRA. Into this maelstrom he tosses Eneas McNulty, a quiet man who would like to live a simple life in Sligo, but who finds himself under the sentence of death by the rebel faction. Eneas lives his life in the shadow of this sentence, haunted by his memories and by nostalgic ties to a place he is barred from forever. The actual story of Eneas, as it unfolded, consistently surprised me. It interested me greatly that he was on the "wrong" side of

Unfortunately the Twentieth century was never that kind of time, and, Ireland was never that place. There are the European Wars and there are Irelands struggles which followed hard on the heels of the First WarWhen I was looking for a name that I could use in my book, I was having difficulty finding something. One night I was watching television and on the news was an account of a car accident in the midlands. One of the witnesses was a local man and his name appeared briefly on the screen. . . Eneas McNulty. It surprised me that the name Aeneas had survived in Ireland, but when you consider the old hedge schools, whose penniless masters spoke more Latin and Irish than English, perhaps it's not so surprising. It seemed the right name for an Irish wanderer. But as you can see, these informal parallels are a world away from Joyce, who modelled his book so intently and masterfully and artfully on the Greek structure.

Young Eneas made some unconsidered, casual choices in his adventurous sign up in the First World War, at a tender age, which had devastating effects on the whole of his life.Bryan Sullivan from Denver, CO: Are there many autobiographical elements to the character of Eneas? Mike from [email protected]: Do you switch your novels any when writing to an American audience? How much do your books vary in Irish form versus American? What follows is both a detailed history lesson and a sensitive contemplation of human behaviour. Touching on themes of family, loyalty and betrayal, Barry presents Eneas as a hugely likeable outsider adrift in a world of troubles not of his own making. Religious dogma, particularly the Catholic variety, is portrayed as an immovable force which cannot be questioned. This motif extends throughout all three novels: a sense, at one end of the scale, of bewilderment over the constraints of the Catholic church and at the other end a livid rage at the horrors perpetrated in its name. Sebastian Barry uses the language with great imagination but never overwrites. This book is a wonderful gift, in every sense." —The Washington Post