On Canaan's Side
i finished reading Sebastian Barry’s new book, “On Canaan’s Side”, feeling emotionally wrung out. I haven’t had such a strong reaction to a story in a very long time. I still had a few chapters left to read as I headed into work to interview Barry. I could see that the 330pm pre record interview was coming up, but I was savouring every word. You know, how sometimes it's easy to skim read, lose whole paragraphs as you race onto the action? You can't do this with this book. You could eat every word. So I found myself listening to the end of an RTE radio interview, while Sebastian Barry waited outside the Dublin studio door and I found myself in the end game of 89 year old Lilly Bere's life, the narrator of the book, who is about to take her own life. As I heard the engineer get Sebastian set up, headphones on, and “ a bit for level” from our engineer, I had completely welled up. I blurted out to him that I was shaking and I could feel the tears in my eyes as I was talking! He liked the shaking bit. Good visceral reaction! I have been raving about “On Canaan’s Side” to friends since I started reading it last week. Right from the get go, Barry’s writing had me or was it the narrator Lilly Bere who really got me?
“What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound”. It is, the chapter heading says, “”First Day without Bill”. Bill is her grandson, whom she has reared since he was two. He is now dead. And Lilly has decided to end her own life too. It’s almost too painful to detail even here, and, while Lilly has a lot of tragedy happen to her during her life, it was her description of the loss of her beloved Bill that broke my heart. “He came into my arms like a known child” is how Barry describes the moment, gut wrenching in its simple beauty.
Barry loves his older female narrators. He bases them, he told me, on his own great aunts and Lilly, like Roseanne McNulty in “The Secret Scripture” and Annie Dunne in “A Long, Long Way” came to him fully formed. He lets them do all the talking, he says; he is just listening.
Just expect for you to be crying.
On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber and Faber
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