Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (Faber, 2023)
ISBN: 9780571332793
RRP: Au$24.99
In Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, Old God’s Time (2024), we are invited into the crumbling mind of recently retired Gardaí detective, Tom Kettle. A widower, Tom has moved to the coast south of Dublin where his flat, a later, lean-to addition to his landlord’s grand Victorian castle, enjoys a commanding view over the harbour below and the island out in the bay. From the centre of the living room, seated in his wicker chair, a cigarillo clamped between his teeth, Tom wiles away the afternoons in a state of ‘vague torment’, gazing out over the water, his memories flitting between the distant past of his national service with the British Army as a sniper in Malaya, scenes from his happy marriage to June, to more recent encounters with his neighbours. Yet as the flat’s rickety construction implies, though he has turned his back on the land and the professional and personal burdens they bring, Tom’s refuge is a frail one and history will not be denied.
In this respect, his journey towards a reckoning with his past, his efforts to reach back through the feints and veils of a collapsing consciousness, his encounters with ghosts, phantoms and real people, his struggle to find his way to a bedrock of fact, is a journey that Ireland as a whole must also undergo. While the country can point to a sad litany of terrible wrongs done to it by others – the crimes detailed here, and the efforts of Church and State to conceal them, emerge from the country’s post-independence period and are inextricably intertwined with the deepest roots of its self-identity. To walk this road requires a painful process of self-recognition. Little wonder that more palatable fantasies have stood in for unbearable truths – but that way, as Tom’s own mental struggles demonstrate, leads if not to madness, then to collective delusion.
History arrives at Tom’s door in the form of two younger detectives, who are investigating the unsolved murder of Father Thaddeus Matthews. Back in the day, Tom and his deceased partner, Billy Drury, had come across Father Matthews while investigating obscene photographs of young boys taken by the curate in his parish. Their efforts to progress what look like an open and shut case of sexual abuse had been blocked at the highest level, when the Chief Commissioner passed on the photographs to the archbishop and invited him to deal with the matter as he saw fit. The curate was ‘counselled’, and, to the fury of Tom and Drury, the case stalled.
Tom’s anger at this outcome had a powerful personal basis. Brought up under the care of the Church, his childhood was a nightmare of violence and sexual abuse: ‘the smell of urine, and the merciless lashing, the stick on his back, on his legs, every night for a thousand years, world without end, and him getting off lightly compared to other boys.’ June, like Tom, was brought up in the care of nuns, and like Tom, found no protection there, suffering appalling sexual abuse as a child, principally at the hands of Father Matthews. When she reveals her experiences to him on their honeymoon in Cherbourg, she laughs at the unlikeliness of this happy outcome given all that they have been through: ‘It’s a wonder we’re alive at all, us two.’ If it was their wounded solitariness that brought them together, their love for one another was ‘their possession and their wealth’, the fortress that shielded them from life’s slings and arrows. They have two children, build a happy home and at last, Tom believes, put the past behind them.
But the past will not be denied. Working on the Byrne case, Father Matthews suddenly looms up in their lives and June, unhinged by this visitation from her childhood, must see him in the flesh to confront and bury the ghost that has long haunted her. These memories, and his recollection of how the priest met his end, gradually crystallise, the mists lift and the veils of uncertainty evaporate, as Tom is dragged back to confront the wreckage that the past has visited on his family. His children, Winnie and Joe, have flitted in and out of the text until now, Joe as a distant presence, working as a doctor in New Mexico, Winnie, a lawyer, living nearby and purportedly liable to dropping by from time to time to set Tom and his flat into some kind of order. But Winnie has been dead for some time already, at which point, paradoxically, other seemingly solid characters in the story shimmer and evaporate. His landlord’s wife, who took him by the hand and mixed him a drink, has been dead for more than a decade, while the little girl who he hears playing downstairs is also in her grave. Is his memory of what happened to Father Matthews a moment when his mind finds the solid bedrock of fact, or is this, and the later memory of him rescuing his neighbour’s son and taking vengeance on his abductor just another fantasy of retribution against past wrongs too monstrous to ever be made right?
It isn’t so much that Tom sees dead people – he converses, socialises and spends his waking hours with them. He is haunted – by his childhood, by the family he loses one-by-one, by his neighbours and their dramas, and above all else by June and the white heat of his love for her. At the end of the novel, sitting up in bed, the past finally confronted in all its agonising detail, June appears at his bedside, a vision so real that, Orpheus-like, Tom fears to reach out and grasp her hand. It is difficult for the reader to know whether Tom is ‘a citizen of grief’, a soul condemned to suffer in torment, or a man who having reckoned with his past and re-united with the one person he loved most on this earth, has found his heaven. Barry’s particular artistry, and the power of the book resides in this not-knowing, in the book’s evocation of a mind forever shimmering between the solid and the evanescent, the bromides of fantasy and the unbearable truths of experience. That Tom and June lived at all, and loved as fiercely as they did, is theirs and Barry’s triumph.
Kevin Foster teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
Tinteán 