The Temporary Gentleman: A Novel
Sebastian Barry
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0143127128
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A stunning new novel from the two-time Man Booker shortlisted author of The Secret Scripture
In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a “temporary gentleman”—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war and world travel—as a soldier in World War II, an engineer, a UN observer—has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan, and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp.
Award-winning author Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman is the sixth book in his cycle of separate yet interconnected novels that brilliantly reimagine characters from Barry’s own family.
The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938-1940
D-Day 1944 (1): Omaha Beach (Campaign, Volume 100)
The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War
The Daring Dozen: Special Forces Legends of World War II
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
out of kilter. He was running with that O’Duffy character, as near to a little Irish Mussolini as you could get, but there was no talking to him about it, and somehow or other marrying Roseanne Clear got bound into all that, like a corncrake is sometimes bound into a sheaf of corn by the careless reaper. That was the news then, that was how things went on. Chapter Thirteen Then there came one afternoon two gentlemen from the bank. The manager himself, Mr Tuohy, and his assistant. It was a
that she shared her Newfoundland with the savages. ‘Tell your father I prefer their company to his,’ she said to Maggie. ‘Mammy says . . .’ said Maggie. ‘It’s alright, Maggie,’ I said. ‘I got the message.’ One day later that same year, I got a card in an envelope from her friend Queenie Moran, to ask if she might meet with me privately in the town. This was an unusual communication, in that I had never had much dealings with Queenie, except in so far as she was Mai’s friend. Queenie sometimes
recent law against wearing such garb in Eire. I understood why De Valera wanted the country to stay neutral, he was afraid the place would erupt in civil war again if he so much as allowed one British battleship into an Irish harbour, but I didn’t agree with him when it came to not being allowed to show the pride I felt in my undertaking as a soldier. Indeed, I passed across the border as if there was no border between the North and South, just as Tom had said. As if there was a secret unity
having the arsenal of phrases to bring us any further. ‘You will,’ I said, ‘you will,’ and then she was past me in a pleasant fog of perfume, and gone. That was how it started. It is evening now in the fringy fields. Tom Quaye was here all day, and cooked a lovely fish stew with okra and palm-nut. He sings songs in Ewe under his breath the whole time, and has excellent English from an Irish priest who taught him years ago. Indeed he has a bit of a Roscommon accent, which makes me homesick. It
‘I did, sir, and I can tell you, it was not you, sir.’ But he was laughing of course. Nevertheless this was verging on miracle and mystery, and I was intrigued and a small bit discombobulated. It is not a stable thought to be suddenly two in the world when you were sure you had only been one. Then I had a strange meeting in the officers’ quarters. The beds were narrow and metal, not in any way better than what the ordinary soldiers had. A democratic barracks, such as you find now and then in
