Retired detective Tom Kettle sits in his wicker chair in front of the window of his seaside apartment in a small, nameless Irish village. He watches the cormorants, he looks at the boxes of books he still hasn’t put up, and he thinks about cleaning his oven and about his deceased wife June, his long-lost children. One day, two detectives show up at his door to ask about a cold case: a priest, stabbed and thrown off a cliff a decade or so earlier. New evidence has come to light, and they need his help.
I’d never read a Sebastian Barry book before. His reputation is excellent, but his work is also quite dense and while Old God’s Time isn’t up there with his most complex works, it is a book that demands your attention. The writing is presented in a non-linear, dreamline fashion, and Tom is an unreliable narrator. For a long time, we don’t know what is real and what is happening in Tom’s head. Ghostly children run across the beach; unicorns appear. He imagines people who aren’t there, who have died long ago; is he senile, or is his imagination just running amok?
This book is imbued with a deep degree of sadness; not the loud, wailing kind, but the quiet kind that is suffered alone. Tom has soldiered on, despite loss and misfortune, and it seems to have broken his mind if not his spirit. The appearance of the two policemen on his doorstep, politely carrying information and carrying out inquiries, “like mormons” doesn’t seem to bother him either way. They’ve come to talk to him about “the fecking priest”; literally, in this case. Tom grew up in an orphanage in 1950s Ireland, as did his wife. We all know what that means. The book’s descriptions of abuse are unsparingly, so proceed with caution.
It’s a dense book full of symbolism: the narrative is often jumbled and deliberately confusing, the facts hazy. It’s not a book to read in a single sitting.
A while ago, I read John Banville’s Snow, which has similar themes and a similar setting, but without the tangled narrative. Both books tackle the subject in different ways, but they both underline the absolute chokehold that Catholicism once had on Ireland. The main character of that novel appeared baffled, whereas Tom appears furious. It’s not hard to feel why.
I won’t say I enjoyed this book, per sé, but I’m glad I read it.