After narrowing my to-be-read selections to three finalists, mixing them up, then blindly choosing the next book to read, I found my hand reach out as I walked down the hall, pulling The Temporary Gentleman off the shelf - that's how it goes.
Written by Sebastian Barry, it's the story of Jack McNulty, an Irishman whose position in the army in World War II was never permanent - a temporary gentleman. Now - in 1957 - he resides in Ghana, half-heartedly working at a government job, thinking over his personal life as he writes a memoir. His devoted servant Tom helps him through bouts of malaria, takes him drinking in local nightclubs, and talk to Jack of his wife living in a far away village he longs to see.
Jack is haunted by the loss of his own love, a wife he met in the early 1920's in Sligo, Ireland. Mae Kirwin was a beauty who stole his heart and his writing recalls their romance, marriage and birth of their children - including leaving them for extended tours in the army and engineering jobs on the Gold Coast, Pakistan and England. Each time he returns, she is less able to deal with life, becoming an alcoholic and neglecting the kids. It could be said she is just unstable, like his brother's wife, but Jack does acknowledge that he is to blame as he leaves them to fend for themselves with no support, at one point causing them to lose their home. At times, efforts were made to stop her drinking, bright days undermined by Jack yet again extinguishing her light.
The novel flashes back and forth between the past and the present as Jack travels with Tom to his home village by motorbike.
It's an intimate story of a family, and one I don't normally choose - Wartime Ireland and tempestuous marriage. I don't enjoy the theme in books and films where the woman (romantically in the man's eye) is too beautiful and too spirited - a tragic beauty who flies too high and is doomed to fall. The man loves her but can't see he is the cause of her demise - leaving her with the kids while the bank forecloses on their home. No one in the story is happy with the results. It had times of lightness, but 'buoyant on a very dark sea'.
Sebastian Barry has written several other novels about this family from different characters point of view (i.e. his brother's crazy wife), which I find so interesting. Very well written, my only fault a dislike at times of the character - signs though it was real and deeply felt.
Barry has won several awards for his novels and has been twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
1932 / Hardcover / 297 pages
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