Hell and SebastianINTERVIEW Sebastian Barry's new novel captures the

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jul 3, 2005 | by Alan Taylor

"YOU never know what's going to happen, " says Sebastian Barry, reflecting on the critical reaction to A Long Long Way, his new novel. "After 28 years [as a writer] you just don't know. It makes you feel like 21 again. Seamus Heaney said to me the last time I met him: 'Did you get away with that last one?'" In the past, says Barry, sipping cranberry juice in Dublin's cavernous Gresham Hotel, he has taken to heart what Charles Dickens said to Hans Christian Anderson when Mrs Dickens found him lying on the ground face down, weeping. "She thought some awful tragedy had occurred. In fact, what had happened to him was he'd got an awful review in, I think, the Pall Mall Gazette.

When Dickens got home that evening, he said: 'Listen here, Hans, a man should read nothing in a newspaper he has not written himself.' That's been my practice for 30 years." Barry has chosen a fortuitous moment to break his resolution. For A Long Long Way has received the kind of reviews which would swell the head of the most modest of writers. Olivia Glazebrook, writing in The Spectator, caught the general tenor, when she said it was "a tragic and terrible tale" with "the pace of an epic poem". Barry's publisher evokes comparisons with Pat Barker's Regeneration, Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, company in which A Long Long Way is by no means disgraced.

It is set in Dublin during the first world war. Its hero is Willie Dunne, a callow, dutiful, biddable youth, who, unlike his father, fell short of the six feet necessary to join the police. Encouraged by Lord Kitchener's famous recruitment appeal, Willie instead joins the army, as did so many of his countrymen. For example, it has been suggested 50,000 Irishmen joined up in the first six months of the war. Another 90,000 entered the fray before war's end in 1918. Of these, around 100,000 were volunteers loyal to John Redmond, the pro Home Rule MP.

Willie was one of them, believing that after the war the British would deliver "the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule".

Events outwith their control, however, overtook Willie and his comrades. Redmond's belief that the war would be short-lived proved over-optimistic. Moreover, as Diarmuid Ferriter asserts in his forthcoming book, The Transformation Of Ireland: 19002000, Redmond "greatly exaggerated the measure of independence an Ireland loyal to the Empire would be allowed to exercise".

Thus, when Willie and his mates returned on furlough from the front in 1916, they found themselves fighting against the very men whose side they were on before they joined up. They are known as "the lost generation", until recently erased from the nation's story by what the historian FX Martin describes as "collective amnesia".

In the annals of Ireland's march to independence, the role played by men such as Willie Dunne was simply too painful to bear scrutiny, and so they were forgotten. The changed political circumstances threw the country into civil war and divided hundreds of families. "Like or lump it, " says one of Willie's fellow soldiers, "we're the f***ing enemy. I mean, we're the f***ing enemy of the f***ing rebels!" By coincidence, one of the novel's crucial scenes takes place in O'Connell Street, in which the Gresham Hotel is situated. A stone's throw from where Barry and I are sitting is the Post Office, its walls still pockmarked by bullets fired during the Easter Rising, which would lead eventually to the formation of an independent Irish state.

Down the boulevard of O'Connell Street, men on horses charged as if part of the Light Brigade. Confusion, however, was the presiding sentiment felt by Willie as he was instructed to confront the mob. Why were Irishmen fighting Irishmen? At whom should he take aim? "Rifle jammed, Private?" demands his captain, when he finds him not firing. "No, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir, " says Willie, not knowing which side he's on.

Barry wrote A Long Long Way in 2003.

He had until 2004 to get it completed, he says. In the event, he beat the deadline by several months. "I don't know what happened to me, " the Dublin-born 50-year-old says incredulously. "It was like I had a ring in my nose and they were pulling me along. But, once I got in with those lads, there was no looking back and I was finished by Christmas that year. I was so glad of that year and I wouldn't trade it for 10 other years, you know." What Barry manages to capture most brilliantly is the rancid, claustrophic atmosphere of the trenches; the wholesome camaraderie of the men; the ever present terror of death; the utter degradation of civilised life. In particular, he manages to convey, with noxious vividness, the effect of poison gas and the inefficiency of gas masks.

"The gas boiled in like a familiar ogre, " he writes. "With the same stately gracelessness it rolled to the edge of the parapet and then, like the heads of a many-headed creature, it toppled gently forward and sank down to join the waiting men. These excellent gas masks instantly lost their excellence for Private Quigley, who at any rate had failed to fit one on his crooked face. One size fitted all, but he had a wondrous cabbage head, and the straps would not lie down. Father Buckley rushed to help, and Quigley now was spluttering and coughing, and started to tear off the mask. Father Buckley was signalling wildly for him to do the bloody opposite . . . the evil gas lay down in the trench like a bedspread, and as more gas came over, it filled the trench to the brim and passed on then in its ghastly hordes to the support lines and the reserve lines, ambitious for choice murders." Barry does not stint on the horror, nor is he frightened, like so many novelists, of showing sentimentality. It is in the conjunction of both that his depiction of war rises to such a sublime height. Rarely before has a novel affected me so profoundly. It is as if Barry has the power to transport one physically back in time to the trenches, where one minute men were laughing and joking and belching and farting and the next were as dead as doornails.