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At a time when questions of identity are fraught and thorny, there’s something daring in the set-up of Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons. Continuing the sweepingly ambitious cycle of stories that draw on a fictionalised version of his own family history, Barry now turns to a minor figure from his previous novel, the Costa prize-winning Days Without End. Winona is a member of the Lakota tribe – “the saddest people that ever were on the earth” – rescued by Thomas McNulty (who narrated the last book) and his partner John Cole. That Barry knows he has strayed into tricksy territory is clear from the off. “I am Winona,” the novel begins, before immediately qualifying this seemingly simple statement of identity. It is Winona’s fate to be adopted and re-presented by men, appropriation that points to the author’s conflicted stance speaking with Winona’s voice. “In early times I was Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty tried very hard to say this name, but he failed, and so he gave me my dead cousin’s name because it was easier in his mouth. Winona means first-born. I was not first-born.”
A Thousand Moons skips forward a few years from Days Without End and although it’s in effect a sequel, the novel stands alone, wasting no time with backstory as it launches into its typically rollicking tale. It’s now 1870 and McNulty and John Cole live together on a starvecrow farm outside of Paris, Tennessee. It’s a kind of utopian oasis in the fractious post-civil war days. The farm is run by the decent, tight-lipped Lige Mason. Alongside McNulty, Cole and Winona – an orphan who is just “the cinders of an Indian fire” – there are two former slaves, Rosalee and Tennyson Bouguereau. Danger is everywhere – from the “nightriders” led by the malevolent Zach Petrie to the dregs of the civil war that still haunt Paris: “The town was still full of rough Union soldiers kicking their heels, and the defeated butternut boys were a sort of secret presence, though they were not in their uniforms. Vagabonds on every little byway. And state militia watchful for those vagabonds.”
The greatest threat to the life of the farm, though, is the racism that means that Winona, Cole (whose “grandmother or the woman before his grandmother was an Indian person”) and the Bouguereaus are never truly safe: “It wasn’t a crime to kill an Indian because an Indian wasn’t anything in particular.” Early on, Winona is raped in an attack of terrible brutality; she’s plied with “distillery whiskey” and is unable to remember who carried out the assault – although all signs point to a local man, Jas Joski, who refers to Winona as his fiancee. Then Tennyson Bouguereau is also attacked, and the fragile peace of the farm is shattered.
Winona sets out on a quest for revenge, dressed “in boy’s britches” with a gun and a knife in her belt. Soon she’s joined by a fiery Chippewa orphan girl, Peg, who becomes her lover. Barry handled scenes of McNulty and Cole cross-dressing in Days Without End immaculately; here, again, we understand the power conferred on Winona by her change in identity, the way she is suddenly able to move freely where she had previously been constrained. Her adventures take her on a journey that is horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure, all of it rendered in Barry’s uniquely lyrical prose, which seems at once effortless and dense with meaning.
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