Old God’s Time

By Sebastian Barry

Fiction/Faber & Faber/Paperback/261 pages/$32.40/Books Kinokuniya
4 out of 5

Tom Kettle, a retired policeman, lives alone on the Irish coast. When two younger cops come knocking about a cold case, he is forced to revisit a past he has either lost due to his deterioriating memory or deliberately buried.

Sebastian Barry’s 11th novel is a seaworn pebble of a story that cracks open to reveal a dark, howling chasm of grief.

Barry, a two-time Costa Book of the Year winner, spent his last two novels in 19th-century Civil War America with Irish emigre Thomas McNulty, who meets the love of his life, fellow soldier John Cole, in Days Without End (2016).

As of A Thousand Moons (2020), they were living on a farm in Tennessee with their adopted Lakota daughter Winona.

Barry returns to his native Ireland for Old God’s Time, in which another McNulty – a young mother fleeing her abusive husband – plays a small but vital role as Tom’s neighbour.

“I don’t know if you have ever been the custodian of a story that no one else believed?” she asks. Tom replies that he has.

This story, which the narrative slowly reveals in quiet and horrifying ways, is about the rampant sexual abuse of children by the Irish priesthood.

Both Tom and his wife June grew up in orphanages where this was rife. As a detective, Tom pursued a case involving priests suspected of such behaviour, but was forced by his superiors to drop it.

Barry, whose turns of phrase are masterful as ever, creates an enormously compelling, tragic character in Tom, who emerges as a deeply unreliable narrator.

Events he believes to be real life are in fact dreams. People he talks to turn out the next day to have been dead for years.

“Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened,” he reflects. “Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time…”

Much like that quintessential Irish classic, Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, this is a stream-of-
consciousness novel with a scatological bent.

It will deliver moments of heart-stopping anguish, followed by flatulence. Tom knows that there is “almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife”.

Old God’s Time is a harrowing portrait of how trauma unravels a person’s life, memory and sense of time.

Yet despite all this, some things endure – like the day Tom met June, how she “in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love”.

If you like this, read: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Anchor Books, 2015, $19.98, Books Kinokuniya), the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted epic novel about four friends in New York City, one of whom endured extreme sexual abuse as a child.