Book Review: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

By Simon Demetriou

‘People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence’, thinks Tom Kettle, the retired policeman whose interior monologue makes up the substance of Old God’s Time. Through Kettle, Sebastian Barry movingly explores the silences arising from trauma, from love, and from the collision of the two.

As the novel begins, Tom Kettle finds himself nine months into his retirement, in which he seeks ‘to be stationary, happy and useless’ in his wicker chair in his lean-to apartment wedged onto a Victorian castle in Dalkey. The desire for stasis becomes understandable as we learn more and more of what Tom has endured, from the violence and castigation of an orphan’s childhood at the hands of ‘the fecking priests’, to the glorified violence of a career as a sniper in the British Army, to the pride and dismay of a career in the Garda. Above all, though, Tom’s wicker chair is a place of escape and rest from the redemptive and destructive pain of personal love and loss.

Everything shivers with the penumbrous particularity of memory in Old God’s Time, as both Tom and the reader grapple with a world in which something might not be true, but still be worth thinking, might not be true, but still be more real than the physical world from which Tom tries to withdraw. Real and unreal, past and present collide with the entrance of two young policemen, forcing Tom to dig into his past and see if he can sift his way to the story he has, finally, to tell himself if he is ever to be freed.

In this story, as the history of a murder unravels, the history of a man’s love unfurls in a book that had me in tears more than once. ‘What was human love? Who the feck knew. But that was their possession and their wealth.’ This is Tom’s conclusion as he explores his love affair with June, Tom’s ‘epic woman. Who had survived everything except survival’, and his ‘sacred task’ as protector of their two children – a task at which he had laboured faithfully, yet failed.

If I’m making Old God’s Time sound like a sad book, I am telling the truth while doing the novel a great disservice. Barry works the spectacular magic of lifting the reader up through the power of his pen and of his character’s humanity, despite the tragedy. After all, Barry, like Tom, is keenly aware that ‘there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife’. This is a book whose words will quiver in your breast long after you put it down.