Spirits of the Irish

The chains of love and the bonds of booze weave through the narrative of 'The Temporary Gentleman', writes Bron Sibree

The Temporary Gentleman ****

Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber, R290)

Sebastian Barry is famed for chronicling 20th-century Ireland in his powerful, poetically charged novels. He set out to dramatise the foibles, fortunes and misfortunes of his own family, and in so doing has created a kind of secret history of his homeland, of "men and women defeated and discarded by their times", as one prominent Irish critic put it. The Temporary Gentleman is part of that ambitious project, which Barry himself describes as "a small effort to write people back into the book of life".

In The Temporary Gentleman he tells the story of his maternal grandfather, a man who seeded his grandson's love of storytelling with tales of his travel and war exploits, but who had squandered his own good fortune through addiction to gambling and alcohol. Barry first wrote about his grandfather in a 1981 novella based on stories his mother, the actress Joan O'Hara, had told him.

"You think there's certain people you can't offend, but I certainly did offend him," he recalls. Not that it prevented Barry writing a play about him after his death, Our Lady of Sligo. "But I always felt I was very hard on him when I wrote about him before. I suppose you could make an argument that this book is hard on him. It is much darker than the others. But then I was on different ground."

The protagonist of The Temporary Gentleman, Jack McNulty, is the older brother of the title character in Barry's 1998 novel, The Whereabouts Of Eneas McNulty, and brother-in-law to Roseanne McNulty of his 2008 Costa Award-winning novel, A Secret Scripture. Unlike either of them, he is not victim of circumstance but architect of his own downfall. "He is," says Barry, "the victorious king who manages to reverse his chess game so that he's the snookered king."

Holed up in Ghana in 1957, where he was once stationed during the war, McNulty is battling booze, guilt and despair while writing a memoir of his long-dead, long-suffering wife Mai and their turbulent, alcohol-soaked marriage. While the novel soars on prose of heart-stopping melodic beauty, it is also a heartbreakingly bleak tale of ruin, with dysfunctional love at its centre.

"We like to think of love as a redeeming quality but it's also sometimes the chain that binds one misguided person to another," says Barry. "At the same time, is not alcohol, which can be delightful, also a most pernicious and destructive drug? If you could itemise the history of alcohol in Irish families and in the history of Ireland, you'd wonder why it isn't three times more illegal that heroin."

Barry's fabled eloquence moves to a higher plane when he speaks of Ireland's woes. He is a passionate believer that nothing should be left unsaid. "That was an instinct I had starting out in the '70s and '80s. When you state these secrets, when you do finally say them, the Irish have this gift of rising up towards the truth. We can say lots of bad things about our own people, we're allowed. But this is a very, very good thing about Ireland. They rise up and meet you halfway. And that," he adds, "is probably why I've kept going." - @BronSibree

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