Sebastian Barry’s novel Old God’s Time — which missed out on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist — is risky format-wise.
The story is told from the viewpoint of the protagonist, but as the pages unfold, it is clear that his observations and memories are untrustworthy.
A tormented soul who has spent his entire life trudging from one unimaginable tragedy to another, 66-year-old Tom Kettle’s stream of consciousness is sometimes real and at other times imagined. This can leave the reader nonplussed and even frustrated.
But perhaps such a risk is necessary for the subject at hand. By drawing the reader into Tom’s affected mind, the novel underscores the catastrophic impact of trauma on individuals.
Tom does not appear unhappy at first. After retiring from the Garda Siochana, the national police service of Ireland, he settles into a lean-to addition at a fake castle in Dalkey, north of Dublin.
He is content to sit on his wicker chair, listen to the sounds of the sea, observe cormorants, and smoke his cigarillos. The whole point of retirement, he contends, is “to be stationary, happy and useless”.
Peace “like a pregnancy”
But his peace lasts only nine months, “like a pregnancy”. Barry sets the tone for what is to come. It is only four in the afternoon, but the sea outside is “copper-dark getting scrubbed over bit by bit by worse darkness”.
Two policemen from the Garda arrive unannounced, seeking Tom’s help with an old case that he is reluctant to revisit.
Tom is unsettled, even “terrified”, by their presence. When they tell him about the case, about “priests in the sixties”, Tom is alarmed. He cries, “Ah no, Jesus, no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.”
But when the policemen leave the next morning, he feels the loss like a “bereavement”.
And who knows the weight of bereavement better than Tom, who has lost his beloved wife June, his daughter Winnie, and also his son Joe?
Slowly, Barry unravels the calamities of Tom’s past in exquisite prose. June and he are no strangers to priests; more specifically, to sexual abuse at the hands of priests. Tom grew up in an orphanage of the Christian Brothers. He remembers how the boys were raped until “the light in their eyes [were] put out”.
June recounts how she “was about two feet tall” when she was first assaulted, while the rapist was “tall as a giraffe... with his big yoke like a rod of steel”.
The story is an indictment of the Catholic church and of the failure of the religious, political, legal, and judicial system in Ireland which left thousands of boys and girls terrorised for decades. Love binds Tom and June; trauma is their shared secret.
And when trauma tears the family apart, it leaves grief, but also love — abundant and unspent — in its wake.
Beyond the law
At some point, Tom too becomes a part of the system.
He knows of the brutalities inflicted on young children, yet when he thinks of his time in the police, he says: “Girls fleeing from laundries, children fleeing from orphanages, all had to be returned. There was no statute he knew of requiring him to do so. It was a matter beyond the law.”
Tragedies in his personal life aside, Tom also witnesses horrors in his job. Yet, when we meet him, Tom is a survivor, with his moral fibre intact and his verve not quashed by depravity.
Finally, it is love, the centrifugal force of his life with June, that pulls him into its embrace.
Barry, who is also a poet and playwright, does not string words together as much as he makes them dance on the page — perform a beautiful ballet here, a feverish flamenco there.
An example: “It was a story of the sun being quenched by the ocean, being put out like a candle wick in water, and who was to light it all again when it pulled itself up in the east, the waters cascading from its shoulders, who was to put the match to it, the merciful life-giving match...” Conversation is sparse in the novel.
Old God’s Time is a powerful, but painful read.
It is proof of Barry’s brilliance and a deeply empathetic portrayal of sexual abuse.
Be prepared and be patient, for you will have to be a companion of Tom’s wandering, unreliable mind.