SONG OF WANDERING ENEAS

SEBASTIAN BARRY'S NOVEL IS A MODERN IRISH EPIC OF DISPLACEMENT

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, July 26, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Born in County Sligo, in the first year of the 20th century, Eneas McNulty is the eldest son of a tailor and a seamstress; his father is a dreamer and musician, his mother a sad-eyed woman whose illegitimate birth has made her the subject of town gossip throughout her life. The father, Tom, keeps gardens, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and these Elysian Fields present an immediate pastoral counterpart to the mental asylum where he and his wife first met, working ``over needles and thread'' to sew clothes for the inmates. The life of the McNulty family, captured in lyrical spareness in the first few pages, is prototypical: hard-working, long-suffering, shaped by the dictates and cruelties of politics and religion in their homeland. Even Eneas's ignorance of these themes is part of the point: He is a child watching his father play the piccolo and his mother dance, he is a boy stealing fruit from the orchard with his beloved friend, Jonno. The innocence will be his gift and his undoing. In the same way he fails to understand the rumors that follow his mum on their shopping trips, he is unaware of the sometimes villainous intricacies of town politics -- the factions of rebellion and nationalism, the arrival of the brutal Black and Tans -- as he grows up. He will not be immune.

``The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty'' is the story of an innocent man's fate -- the collision of good intention with the thunderstorms of the gods -- but it is Sebastian Barry's iridescent prose that coalesces this narrative, that gives it a lush sensibility at least as defining as the plot itself. In the beginning of the novel, this richness is almost off-putting. Eneas's story feels overtly mythic from its opening pages, with its fecund metaphors of paradise and hell, its hovering edifices of church and state. The accompanying fear is that Eneas himself will be eclipsed, his character undone by the riptides of classical gravity, or by the quieter waves of Barry's inimitable style. And even though Eneas is almost always depicted from the outside in -- through external, distanced description rather than dialogue or inner consciousness -- his lifelong flight (and his reaction to it) will eventually be what determines him. The story that emerges through Barry's lens is so cohesive, so gracefully rendered, that his words have the stony allure of the Irish poets and the lyrical pull of an epic storyteller.

That's not to say it will appeal to the more plot-demanding. Reaching for the archetypal heartbreak of a banished soul, the tale of Eneas's estrangement from his homeland is necessarily anecdotal and even picaresque; what triumphs, finally, is the inner compass of the man himself -- guided by the guileless decency that got him into such trouble to begin with. Having joined the British Merchant Navy as a boy, Eneas returns to a post-World War I Ireland in the midst of its own rebellion. With the innocence of other ``lost men, ordinary fellas from the back farms of Ireland, fools and flotsam and youngsters without an ounce of sense or understanding,'' he joins the Royal Irish Constabulary. Which will soon enough be connected to their murderous defenders, the Auxiliaries, or Tans, who will casually kill any backroads hero looking to free Ireland. Jonno, the roughhousing boy who gave Eneas half the joy of his childhood, is on the other side, the patriots murmuring the name of Michael Collins in secret meetings. When Eneas finds himself witness to the murder of a good-hearted, old-school policeman, he resigns his post and disavows the violence of both sides -- refusing to help Jonno and the rebels assassinate a key member of the Tans.

This pacifist stubbornness effectively blacklists Eneas for life. The death warrant on his head -- he's basically scapegoated as a traitor -- is reissued over the decades, every time he returns to Sligo to see his family or renegotiate his fate. So begins a life of exile: ``alone, hated, but human on the ravelling road.'' Working on a herring boat off the coast of Scotland, he sees a ship full of Jews being returned to Germany after every port they approached had turned them away. ``For what is the world without rescue,'' thinks Eneas, ``but a wasteland and a worthless peril?'' And then he is headed to France, his uniform bearing the stripes of a sergeant major, part of the King's army trying to save the fields of France from Hitler.

On a beach that will go down in history as Dunkirk, he loses his footing and almost his mind. Fear has driven Eneas for years; he has learned to live with the taste of it, has slept in its shadows all over the world. He is a man not so much diminished by fear as defined by it, and his courage lies in his ability to coexist with such terror, rather than overcome it. The reappearance of a friendly stranger on the road -- he's a version of Aeneas's faithful Achates -- will give tether to his life, will make the years and the loneliness bearable, both for him and for us.

``The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty'' is a beautiful story, though its beauty creeps over you stealthily at first, like morning fog. And certainly it's an idiosyncratic novel, with its prose as rich as those Elysian gardens of Old Tom McNulty, its time lines as sketchy and seemingly random as history itself. Its legacy is the portrait of a wounded and yet untainted hero, his heart broken irreparably but his pockets full of stars.