The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by
Sebastian Barry

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For Eneas McNulty, a happy innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict. Unable to find work in the depressed times after World War 1, Eneas joins the British-led police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary - a decision that alters the course of his life. To those intent on winning freedom from eight hundred years of British oppression, Eneas has unwittingly committed an act of betrayal. Branded as a traitor and marked for death, Eneas is forced to flee his homeland, his family, and Viv, the woman he loves. Pursued by an assassin chosen to kill him, his childhood friend and IRA enforcer Jonno Lynch, Eneas travels the world seeking to escape his fate. Through peacetime and wartime, loneliness and friendship, he is ever unable to reclaim his stolen life, yet he persists through his vicissitudes with a tragic grace. Written with passion and a tender wit, The whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is the story of a lost man and a compelling saga that illuminates Ireland's heartbreaking and complex history.
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and read Latin and English at Trinity College, Dublin. The author of three collections of poems and three books of prose, he has written for the theatre since 1986; his best-known play is The Steward of Christendom, which has won numerous awards. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty:

Eneas McNulty is an exile and an outcast. Born in Sligo in pre-independence Ireland, he joins the British Merchant Navy at 16 years of age during World War 1 as an act of patriotism and later in the R.I.C. briefly. When he refuses to murder a senior figure in the Black and Tans he is banished from the country by the local leaders of the Independence movement. He makes brief returns to Sligo at long intervals but always feels threatened and leaves to go wandering once more. The narrative is in the present tense throughout and told in Eneas's voice. The language is quaint and not a little affected; although occasionally poetic much of it comes over as rather fake Synge-speak in the mode of The Playboy of the Western World, e.g., Eneas is "afeared" - "his ease is troubled" etc. The author is also weak on social history; he refers to evening mass and the wearing of mantillas in 1920's Ireland! He also doesn't seem aware that the bicycle was the main mode of travel in Ireland before the 1960's and that cars were few and far between. No doubt there is a case for an Irish novel on people who felt excluded from the nationalistic ethos of the New State but this one neither engages nor convinces. Eneas is an outcast, a hated figure - why then do I feel no pity, no compassion, merely irritation.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)