Book reviews by Frank O’Shea
OLD GOD’S TIME. By Sebastian Barry. Faber 2023. 261 pp
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is different. Very different. It is almost like an extended meditation on life and the different things that people put up with in an ordinary life. ‘Things happened to people, and some people were required to lift great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure.’
The person referred to is Tom Kettle, a recently retired Garda sergeant from the detective division. He retired to cheers and goodwill and moved from the north side of Dublin to an annex beside a castle in Dalkey on the other side of the city. Here he sits in a ‘sun-faded wicker chair in the middle of his living room,’ smoking his cigarillos and watching the cormorants and sea birds and the movements of the ocean.
He is visited by two young detectives from his former division. They are looking for some input from him in a case that has come up, but somehow, even though they stay overnight, they never manage to raise the case with him. It is much later in the book before we learn that the case involves a priest who has been accused of sexual crimes involving young boys. That person suggests that some twenty years earlier, when another priest friend of his named Thaddeus was murdered, Tom Kettle was in the vicinity.
As the narrative proceeds, Kettle recalls his youth in a Christian Brothers orphanage where he was abused. To get away, he joined the British army and spent a short time with them as a sharpshooter in Malaya. When he meets his wife June, who had also spent her childhood in an orphanage, they are determined that their two children Winnie and Joe would have only love and kindness. At one stage, June tells Tom that she was abused terribly from the age of six by a priest, the same Thaddeus who would later be found dead on the side of a mountain.
Perhaps you can see where the story is going, though there are other incidents where Tom is called upon to help one of his neighbours. However, most of the action in the story takes place in Tom’s mind and is recalled in long ruminations and recollections. I said the book is different, that being one of the things that is unusual. You will notice another difference if you pick up the book and glance through the pages which seem to be made up of long paragraphs with no dialogue.
Reviews in the media have highlighted the story of sexual abuse of children in Ireland and have stressed that the book is about that. However, this reviewer did not feel that this was the central theme, as much as the investigation of the mind of an older man, in many ways a heartbreaking story, the story of a good man and woman whose lives were haunted by their childhood. There are little patches of lightness, like winter sun, to ease the intensity, but the final scene will leave the reader shattered. Different, yes, but a magnificent description of what goes on in the head of an older man who has lost everything.
Going Back. By Eugene O’Brien. Gill Books 2022. 322 pp. €16.99
Like Sebastian Barry’s book, above, this story is set in Ireland. But a completely different Ireland, a place that one would not want to live in. Perhaps the fault is where the story is set, County Offaly in the Irish midlands, where they appear to speak a different language, liberally spiced with the f-word. Indeed, this book may well have some kind of record for the frequency of the use of that word.
The central character is Scobie Donoghue. At the age of 40, he has returned to Offaly after ten years in Melbourne and Victoria. His older brother is married there and settled and appears to be more sensible than his younger sibling. Scobie has broken up with a long-time girlfriend and when he gets back to Ireland he at first keeps away from the drink and the various puffing and sniffing drugs that he depended on in Australia – referred to as Oz throughout, by the way.
His good intentions do not last and he is soon back to his old ways of late-night drinking and womanising and eventually becomes dependent on Xanax tablets, prescribed to him to deal with anxiety. As the story ends, the country is in Covid lockdown and he is having some success with a counsellor whom he visits once a week. In the final pages, he is on a Zoom call with his former Melbourne girlfriend.
It may be that the book is intended as a fictional treatment of the difficulty a young man has who arrives in his forties with nothing by way of career, unusual talent or steady partner. He is still living at home with his mother and her second husband and gets on well with them when he is there. At various times, we are introduced to each of them and their problems when younger. Scobie spends a lot of time in his head, trying to work things out, but a reader would not want to bet too much on his future success, even with the help of a counsellor.
It is not easy to have any sympathy or fellow-feeling for Scobie or indeed for any of the characters in the book. If what is represented here is supposed to be modern small-town Ireland, then God help the place. Novelists like Donal Ryan have written affectionately, and one feels more accurately, about small-town Ireland. Perhaps Offaly is different – a complete town without a single character with whom a reader might have some empathy.
Here, for example, is our central character watching a television program. ‘He had turned over to Winning Streak to see all the families roaring and shouting with their shitty home-made signs, and the contestants forced to make small-talk with Marty and then get cash and prizes for doing f—-all. You didn’t even have to answer a Jaysus question.’ This kind of language is not exclusive to Scobie and those of his age and younger. Here is his mother trying ‘to wrench her arm free. ‘Take your f…ing hand off of me or I swear …’’
With all the introspection and recalling of past events, the book is not easy reading. And considering how he treats the place, the author would be advised to avoid County Offaly in his travels. The reader might be similarly advised: they appear to speak a different form of English there.
CLOSE TO HOME. By Michael Magee. Penguin 2023. 287 pp. €16.99
In some ways, this book and its treatment of Belfast goes with Eugene O’Brien’s account of modern Offaly. The characters in both books are drinkers, drug takers and general layabouts. There is one major difference, however: the characters here are twenty years younger, so the reader may feel that this is really how things are and may be able to imagine them as being like the young men who meet the police in the evening news.
The central character is Sean Maguire, recently returned from completing his degree in Liverpool. Both parts of his name indicate the particular side of Belfast to which he and his friends belong. The year, however is 2013, so the action is set in the relative peace that one would find in any modern city. Sean is happy to take work in pubs or clubs, employment far removed from his English literature degree.
The book’s opening sentence sets the scene. ‘There was nothing to it. I swung and hit him and he dropped.’ It was a house party, probably one which he had crashed. He felt that the ribbing he was getting entitled him to take the action he did. However, the injured party and his family insisted that the peelers take him to court where he was sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a fine of £600.
The remainder of the book describes some of the work he is required to volunteer for – work in cemeteries, cleaning a church and surrounding areas. He has had to live with his mother, who looks after him well. By the end of the book, he has notched up the needed 200 hours and has moved from a number of paid jobs before ending up at work in a classy pub.
The action of the book is more like a series of loosely connected events rather than a story progressing to a conclusion. The particular Belfast words or phrases are not immediately clear in their meaning, but they add to the working-class image of struggling people. ‘I could wing bottles like a champion … a couple of keys … have a nugget … selling shots … the hippies and the emos … she’d been out on the swall … I went to the bru.’
The book can also be read as an account of a family that survives internal and external troubles. The external ones were from 20 years earlier when ‘the Brits’ and ‘the peelers’ were a constant source of problems. The main internal problem refers to the father of the family who had abused Anthony, the oldest of the boys, before being sent packing by his wife, the mother of the family. Anthony is now a serial binge drinker and general troublemaker, but the father has progressed to success in a business outside the city. He has a daughter Aoife who is followed relentlessly by Sean, not in a bad way, but keen to actually meet and speak with his half-sister.
This is modern Belfast of limited opportunities as lived by young people of limited abilities. But it is not Offaly.
Frank is a member of the Tintean collective.
Tinteán 