Sebastian Barry is having a happy new year, with a stack of Books of 2016 recommendations and now a Costa award shortlisting (again). “Barry is a marvellous writer, and Days Without End is a beautifully written novel of the American west, the US cavalry, the Indian wars, the civil war and its aftermath,” wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman. “The narrative is gripping, descriptions of landscape vivid and beautiful, evocations of military life, brutal warfare, cruelty and courage utterly compelling.” Barry’s hero is a young Sligo boy, Thomas McNulty, and Erica Wagner in the Financial Times described his relationship with another young outsider, John Cole, as “not only a story of survival [but] a love story, too, written in a gorgeous style that blends Barry’s characteristic eloquence with the straight-talk of early America ... firmly in the tradition of Irish diaspora writing”. The Telegraph’s Gillian Reynolds admired how Barry’s “great river of drama, poetry and fiction flows from the spring of living history, stories your grandfather might have remembered his mother telling him about her grandfather”, while for Eoin McNamee in the Irish Times, the language was the thing: “There is a majestic rhythm to Barry’s prose, deep craft in the shaping of the novel, the impetus of events carrying us through at pace … Barry is the most humane of writers.”
Penelope Lively is another “master” storyteller, according to Imogen Lycett Green in the Daily Mail, and her collection The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is “Lively at her most affecting”. With “guts and style”, she “takes a situation and holds it upside down, rattling its pockets until she has squeezed out of it every last ounce of meaning and turned the whole story, stylistically, on a sixpence. [She] can use a shopping trip to explore the whole spectrum of human behaviour. Yet there is something unnerving about her ability to see through her protagonists; they get away with nothing, and you, as the reader, feel under scrutiny, too.” The Sunday Times’s Phil Baker agreed, finding the stories “well thought-out”, with “patterns of interaction between past and present … sounded out to good effect”, while the Sunday Telegraph’s Sarah Crown argued that Lively’s work has always been about time. “Lively has the gift, rare and wonderful,” she wrote, “of being able to peel back the layers one by one and set them before us, translucent and gleaming.”
Reviewers were divided on Grayson Perry’s treatise The Descent of Man. To William Leith in the Financial Times, it is “thoughtful, clearly written and a joy to read. It would be great if he was right. In any case, a lot of what he says feels timely.” Helen Davies in the Sunday Times wrote that “Perry … has done lots of research and his book is studded with depressing statistics … [but] in the end, one is left with the feeling that, for all the bluster, and despite the importance of the issue, his cheerleading for the future of his fellow men (in whatever they may choose to wear) has fallen rather flat.” The Times’s Clive Davis found that “Whenever Perry’s own voice breaks through, he is thoroughly engaging and charismatic. For the most part, though, he adopts the guise of a pious writer of long-winded ‘whither the male sex?’ comment pieces.” But the Observer’s Matt Haig was a fan, reassuring readers that “While The Descent of Man may be an attack on certain aspects of masculinity, it is not an attack on men.”
