The Temporary Gentleman
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- €9.99
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
OLD GOD'S TIME (MARCH 2023), SEBASTIAN BARRY'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW
A stunning return from the prize-winning and best-selling author ofThe Secret Scripture
Jack McNulty is a 'temporary gentleman', an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent. In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, he urgently sets out to write his story. He feels he cannot take one step further, or even hardly a breath, without looking back at all that has befallen him.
He is an ordinary man, both petty and heroic, but he has seen extraordinary things. He has worked
and wandered around the world - as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer - trying to follow his childhood ambition to better himself. And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage. Mai Kirwan was a great beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, a vivid mind, but an elusive and mysterious figure too. Jack married her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp.
A heart-breaking portrait of one man's life - of his demons and his lost love - The Temporary Gentleman is, ultimately, a novel about Jack's last bid for freedom, from the savage realities of the past and from himself.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With exquisitely beautiful prose, Irish author Sebastian Barry unfolds the story of Irishman Jack McNulty: a deeply flawed man who sits at a desk in his makeshift home in Accra, Ghana, recording the extraordinary details of his life. As The Temporary Gentleman’s erratic narrator revisits his itinerant adventures and spectacular failures—most notably his doomed marriage to the brilliant-but-troubled Mai Kirwan—you’re sucked into a powerful, compelling and achingly sad tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest novel from Barry (The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty) is a lyrical but ironic period story. Jack McNulty (Eneas's younger brother), of Sligo, Ireland, first appears during WWII, as a soldier in Britain's army, en route to Africa and admiring a peaceful sea, moments before a submarine torpedoes his ship. When we next see him, in 1957, Jack is living in self-imposed exile in Ghana, recalling his days as a soldier and civil servant, and as a suitor, lover, and husband to the haunting and haunted Mai Kirwan. Jack courts Mai avidly; then, after they marry, he gambles away her inheritance and allows creditors to take their house. Having left his two daughters in Ireland, Jack finds a close companion in Ghana: his houseboy, Tom Quaye. Jack must flee the country, however, after a drunken night out with Tom that ends in violence. Even while preparing to leave, Jack's thoughts return to the past: helping his mother research their family's history, defusing unexploded German bombs in England, and working as both a U.N. observer and a gunrunner in Africa. With this complex portrait of a man rooted in his hometown but drawn into a wider warring world, Barry again proves himself a prose artist and a skilled navigator of the rocky shoals of modern morality and Irish heritage.
