NOT a sequel, nor a prequel but an intersectional to A Thousand Moons, the third in the Thomas McNulty travels through civil war-torn American south.  Barry has a commanding talent for finding a first person voice, here Rosalee’s twin brother Tennyson who was beaten dumb in the last book, who was Winona’s silent confidante.

Not the history, of course, that hangs on the walls of the big Paris houses of the small, fat Colonel Littlefair or the rebellious, hooded Petrie family. No, Sir. This history comes up from the bottom field, up from the roots. If A Thousand Moons was a love story, this is a story of freedom. Tennyson is a freed slave, but not so free. “Hades did not seem so bad. It was not Mississippi.”

The title might explain better as the Odyssey of Tennyson Bougereau. The opening paragraph sets things rolling.

“My father Chas Bougereau upped sticks some 60 years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. That was 1840.”

The text dances, almost poetry. Laughter is rusty. There is a steam of worry, a scribbled place. There is an epic description of Tennyson having the first bath of his life, aged past 20 something, ages, saliently, are something everyone struggles with.

The plot moves quick, quick, slow, a series of vignettes, Stations of the Cross, swapping events, thoughts, asides in easy going southern drawl. Tennyson the silent, shy, strong man, the witness to events.

Barry has written more plays than novels and each scene sets one moment up against another. Tennyson stands to one side as narrator. The writing is stage craft: Enter the colonel, Rosalee makes coffee, she brings it back into the room, he sips it. The conversation can begin.

The colour is all beautiful Tennessee but the location is just so much water colour wash behind the action.  Barry writes about people. He has an ear for the jargon of the time. An eye for the import of things.

McNulty has only a bit part here, but he arrives in the nick of time along with Winona and John Cole, descendants from the other books…

This is a great American novel. Maybe even the American novel, in the idiom of Huckleberry Finn. The first of the trilogy is the watr torn Days Without End. Heroic writing.