Sebastian Barry (2011) On Canna’s Side.

Lily Bere is determined to kill herself. Her beloved grandson Bill, a Gulf War veteran is dead and her life seems blighted, but as an eighty-nine-year old woman she can hardly muster the energy to commit herself to that final act. Her life has been full of loss and betrayal. She takes us back to the tranquil times before the Eastern Uprising when her dad had risen to chief superintentant of  Division B, one of the top police officers in Dublin. Her brother Willie dies in the First World War trenches and a messanger from that time, Tadg Bere, brings back a message of how much he loved his family to the assembled family. Tadg makes two decisions that changes their lives. He courts Lily and as an unemployed soldier joins a newly mustered regiment called colloquially The Black and Tans. A price is put on his head by the IRA and even though they’ve barely kissed Lilly’s name is on the same hit list. They flee by boat by liner to New York and settle in Chicago. There’s poetry here:  "I almost laughed at the memory of Dublin, with its low houses, their roofs tipped like deferential hats to the imperious rain."Tadg is gunned down and Lily, with her lover’s blood on her face, is forced to flee. With no money and no relations she steps on a train and gets off when she gets off. She finds work as a servant and friendship with another servant that  happens to be black and is casually raped by her master almost every night. Somehow she also finds love with a police man on his beat. Joe Kinderman has a Jewish sounding name but there’s something about him that just doesn’t stick. This relationship of love and loss takes the novel up and past the Second World War and is perhaps the best part of the book. Lily and Joe have a son, a boy that get’s lost in the Vietnam War and although he survives comes back too fragile to survive in contemporary society. There’s echoes here of the hurt of Rosanne Clear’s testimony from the inside of a mental institution. The denouement in both books has a similiar ring to it. But this I think is the better of the two.