Start with a torpedo, and see where you go from there

Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold Coast. We experience everything through the senses of ‘temporary gentleman’ Jack McNulty — an Irish officer in the British army with a short-term commission. Brimful of whiskey, his racing winnings jingling cheerily in his pocket, McNulty stands on deck ‘somewhat in love with an unknown coastline’, and the reader is, instantly, somewhat in love, and completely bound up with, this red-haired chancer.

In the seconds that follow the torpedo, McNulty, almost a medieval Everyman, experiences a vision of heaven and hell and all stages between. One moment ‘a winged man suspended’, the next plummeting, ‘a hundred demons yanking on my legs’, he sends his

last signal of love…to Mai and my children, up the night-filthied coast of Africa, across the Canaries, across the old boot of England and the ancient baby-shape of Ireland…I love thee, Mai, I am sorry, I am sorry.

But it’s not his last signal of love. McNulty survives the shipwreck, ‘ticking with life, triumphant, terrified’, only to be hurled back into the shipwreck of his marriage, the desolation of his failed fatherhood, the smoking ruins of his youthful talents, and the reader hurtles along with him. He’s writing the story of his doomed life in Accra in 1957, in decrepit late middle age.

The relationship between McNulty and his Ghanaian servant Tom Quaye, both exiled from the family and homeland, is sensitively done, and the atmosphere of dusty colonial sunset is entirely convincing, as are other excursions to the Sahara, the north-west passage, Yorkshire and elsewhere; but it is when the story backtracks to the Sligo of the 1920s and 1930s that one’s heart leaps into one’s mouth and stays there.