On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry


Grieving for a Lost Century

Sadness is not easy to write about in a sustained way. It can quickly transform into either sentimentality or resentment. Sebastian Barry knows the rules of writing about sadness. There must be structure to contain its excesses. He uses a day by day diary of the memory of four wars and their accompanying deaths. It must have a point, a purpose. His purpose is preparation for imminent death by suicide of someone who has experienced all she is capable of in life. And it must be, magically perhaps, near universal in its concrete, unique details lest it deteriorate into mere history. Barry is the required magician who can find the general in the most personal.

Violence breeds, among much else, fear. Whether victim or victimiser, fear is a residue of harm done, harm experienced or harm avoided. Fear lasts far longer than the wounds of harm. Ireland is a land which from time to time has been full of fear. And even when they leave it, the Irish (and not just them but all emigrants) carry some of the fear with them. It then shows itself as regret and revenge, even after a lifetime elsewhere, even after generations. And revenge and regret generate betrayal, which creates yet more fear - in the betrayer as well as the betrayed - and therefore more violence. The cycle increases like the strength of a tropical storm as it careens across the ocean to America.

The old know the sorrow of violence and how it is passed on. They can see the hurricane of violence for what it is. But they have no one for whom their knowledge has meaning. Language necessary to tell about what they know does not exist. Their unbearable loneliness is not caused by an absence of others but by the presence of innumerable others who cannot understand the sorrow they have accumulated. Thus the authentic emotion of age is not sadness but despair.

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