On Canaan's Side

I chose to read On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Berry based on an NPR blurb about 2011’s best books – best in that they stuck with the reviewer. I remember this one being described as ‘haunting’. On finishing the book, I decided I liked it quite a bit, but didn’t think it lived up to that description. Until a couple weeks passed and I find myself still thinking about it. I still can’t put my finger on why.

Here’s some information from The Guardian on it:

In his fifth novel, Sebastian Barry takes up the story of another of the Dunnes, the family whose members have appeared in Annie Dunne and A Long, Long Way and in his play The Steward of Christendom. Eighty-nine-year-old Lilly Bere recounts the events of her life as though mesmerised by the vivid incompleteness of a remembered dream

By anybody's reckoning, Lilly's life is a traumatic one, encompassing multiple bereavements and separations, material hardship, numerous upheavals and unrelieved exile from an oppressed and divided homeland. Her indomitability […] derives in part from the very invisibility and stoicism that she has had to cultivate and for the joy in small reliefs and pleasures to which that has led.

This concentration on isolating tiny fragments of experience and apprehension makes for an intense and immersive read, one in which brutal events are cast in a diffuse light that gives them an almost mythic quality. But the narrative's dreamlike qualities do not eclipse Barry's determination to scrutinise the less travelled byways of history and to give a voice to their buffeted, battered but nonetheless enduring victims.