![]() ![]() Evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, Days without End is a timeless work of historical fiction. Theirs is an epic romance, and Thomas’ words are eloquent testimony to it. Their experiences are extravagant, yes, and, as Thomas says, “The mind is a wild liar,” but readers know he is telling the truth of the horrors the two witness in “the horrible butcher shop of carnage” where death is busy “at his frantic task.” But there are good times, too, as when they marry, unofficially adopt a young Indian girl, and find work on a friend’s farm. Then freed, they find a new life together in Tennessee but one that becomes haunted by the possibility of disaster and ruin. Then, soldiers once again, this time in the Civil War, landing in the notorious prison of Andersonville. And the stories he tells! Of their joining the army as teenagers in the early 1850s and then, in the West, witnessing the massacre of Indians, of enduring punishing extremes of temperatures on the plains, of being mustered out of the army and then appearing onstage in a minstrel show, Thomas, with his beautiful face, dressed as a woman. The book is in dialogue with and in some ways a rebuttal to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, in that the gay relationship is the only consistently joyful thing in otherwise bleak novel about genocide and American empire, rather than the source of anguish and frustration it is in Proulx’s novel. ![]() ![]() “John Cole was my love, all my love,” declares young Irish immigrant Thomas McNulty, who tells the story of their lives together in an unlettered but beautifully realized voice that is a tour de force of style and atmosphere. ![]()
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