‘Old God’s Time’ is slow-moving, but simply a dazzling read
Evolving at a stately but plausible pace, Sebastian Barry’s new book encompasses a great deal of Irish social history in a gripping and realistic manner
I had to wait several months to get a copy of Sebastian Barry’s new novel.
An American friend had highly recommended it, and I was attracted by its title. What, I wondered, does “Old God’s Time” mean? Take Cover Books in East City informed me that the delay was occasioned by Penguin Books preparing a paperback edition in the wake of its hardcover success. In the interim no hard cover could be located.
It finally reached me in early April and was well worth the extended wait. “Old God’s Time” is a brilliant, engaging, charming, and often puzzling book, but it is a great read in its historical Irish breadth and the slow-developing intensity of its action. Its narrator, Tom Kettle, controls what we see and how we see it, though he is sometimes unreliable about what he is witnessing and what he is feeling. So, it is really Sebastian Barry in firm control.
Two reasons account for my puzzlement. Kettle is a retired Dublin policeman with a complex and difficult past that belies his excellent record as a policeman. Retired for less than a year, he seems to be suffering from lapses of memory and occasional hallucinations during his lonely retirement. Secondly, he carries within his memory a particular experience which he protects against any intrusion. Now 65, Tom is very much alone. He has outlived his wife June and both of their children. He has little interaction with his new neighbours. He sees himself as having “washed up” in a “mock-Gothic” Victorian apartment with “the stirring sound of the sea below [his] picture window.” The house is located on the rugged coast of Dalkey, a posh town just south of Dublin.
“He loved to sit is his sun-faded wicker chair in the dead centre of his living room, feet pointed toward the affecting murmurs of the sea, smoking his cigarillos.” And watching the cormorants preening on the black rocks below. But his sedentary pleasures have a dark, hidden side. He has a cello-playing neighbour who likes to shoot at the cormorants from his balcony; other neighbours seem distant and mysterious.
He is uneasy about his inactivity and bad habits. His days contain “The peril of pleasant thoughts.” While he likes to think that “the whole point of retirement, of existence — was to be stationary, happy and useless”, the reader realizes that there is for him a deep gulf between ‘retirement’ and ‘existence.’ Internally, there is “a fury” within him, born of his parentless youth in Ireland and confirmed by his frustrating observations as an officer of the law.
His state of ease is upended when two detectives from his old station visit him one evening. Ostensibly they want his help in solving a cold case that has recently resurfaced through the use of forensic evidence. The case concerns the unsolved murder in Dublin of a Catholic priest named Father Thaddeus Matthews. Tom had been involved in the original investigation and his former boss Jack Fleming is now asking for his help in the ‘new’ case, in part because, as we learn, allegations against Kettle have been brought forward by another priest. The police hope that a blood test will clear Kettle of suspicion.
The cleverness and intensity of the novel lies in Sebastian Barry’s unerring control of Tom’s narration. What Tom sees and thinks is all we have to go on. If he is hallucinating, for instance, about a visit by his deceased daughter Winnie, it is as if he wants to believe that she is still alive and looking after him. Nevertheless, Tom slowly begins to comprehend what we might call the bigger picture as it unfolds for him; though he remains hesitant to become engaged, a side of him likes being in the swim again.
On his own he at one point picks up a rope and considers suicide before he is interrupted. However, as the new case becomes clearer to him, his vivid memories of his painful boyhood and his loving relationship with his wife June flood back upon him. Tom and June have individually been scarred by their experiences as children under the legitimized control of Catholic priests. In fact, the deeper story concerns those “fecking priests,” as one officer calls them. He cannot forget their sexual predations and their lack of conscience, abetted by the nuns who supported them. As he is drawn into the case, he vividly recalls that he and June were responsible for the death of Father
Thaddeus Matthews. Now, so many years later, with new forensic data on hand and Matthews’ friend Father Joseph Byrne pressing charges against him, the issue of murder and responsibility has resurfaced. Claiming to have photographs from that eventful day in the mountains, Byrne is using them to avoid charges that he himself is facing for his own past sexual crimes. To Tom there was no question of blame — the two priests had been “two jackals in a coop devouring little chickens.”
The drama and engagement of “Old God’s Time” is all about Tom Kettle and his inner life. When the visiting detectives rouse him from his stuporous retirement, they set his mind and memory at non-stop alert.
Summoned by Jack Fleming to the old Dublin police station, he leaves his retirement digs and reenters the world of contemporary Dublin where he must revisit his old life under daunting new circumstances.
Often in tears, mostly in private moments, he is intensely engaged with his life then and now. As a reader, you realize that “Old God’s Time” is a different kind of detective novel, one in which a retired detective is himself indirectly on trial, both in the ongoing case and in his overly active mind. “Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened,” Tom thinks. “Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they are gone.”
But ‘old God’s time’ cannot vanish for Tom or for the Dublin police, given forensics and Byrne’s charges. The “terrible” pain that remains deep inside Tom has become a matter of business for the Dublin police. What society had allowed in the past (call it an aspect of ‘old God’s time’) and what is deemed allowable in the present day are very different matters. Tom had been a good cop in his time, always abiding by professional standards and leaving domestic injustices alone. “[J]ust the once” did he cross that line. And now the bill collector has arrived.
The novel is a stunning look into an elderly mind under duress. The interactions between Tom and his former colleagues are striking and authentic; the affection they feel for him is palpable, as is Tom’s for them. The language of collegial talk — there are many boyos, girleens and maneens — flows attractively from thought to thought, incident to incident. The delicate love between Tom and June is particularly powerful, salvaged as it was from their respective childhoods; alone now, Tom is “the orphan of his former happiness” with her, “an old policeman with a buckled heart.”
“Old God’s Time” is a slow-moving, but dazzling read. Evolving at a stately but plausible pace, it encompasses a great deal of Irish social history in a gripping and realistic manner with a touch or two of Hollywood in the mix. Sebastian Barry is a playwright and a poet in addition to a seasoned, much honoured novelist. His manifold skills are everywhere evident here. Could this be the novel that wins for him the coveted Booker Prize?