Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time: reading for grown ups

So the question is – do you want a novelist to hold you by the hand? Do you want a captivating intro, an intro which has obviously been worked over to the degree that it has become almost translucent? Then would you like the author to take a step back, to describe the characters one by one, perhaps even telling us the colour of their eyes (although how that is meant to help the reader I really don’t know)? And would you like this to be facilitated by a reliable and all-knowing narrator who makes sure that you always knows where you are and where you are going?

Or not? The not is what Sebastian Barry gives you in Old God’s Time. I thought I was in for a gentle tale told by a reliable narrator. But instead I found myself on an unexpectedly wild ride. Tom Kettle is newly retired, formerly a policeman, and so in in a state of recalibration. You would think that a retired Irish policeman named Tom Kettle would be the very definition of solidity and reliability. But reading Old God’s Time was like trying to stand on the deck of a ship in the midst of a storm, or at least a heavy swell. Because when Tom is visited by his daughter, who is doing that daughterly thing of trying to whisk him into shape since her mother is no longer there to do it, it turns out that his daughter is – dead. Tom constantly describes events and people who just aren’t there.

The novel opens on a dark and stormy night with a visit from the local police. They are trying to solve an old crime – one which, it seems, is very personal and painful to Tom. But what is it and who was responsible? We aren’t entirely clear and it seems that Tom isn’t, either. We are kept firmly in the dark, because that is where Tom Kettle is himself. In fact I was more than half-way through the novel before it became clear that the crime which the policemen are investigating is the murder of a priest, and that Tom is the prime suspect. The priest, it turns out, had abused Tom’s late wife while she was growing up in care, although the police are not aware of this pertinent fact. And although we are inhabiting Tom’s mind, it’s not clear if he did it or not. The tone is highly wrought, emotional, but simultaneously down to earth and with moments of comedy, the sort of comedy which derives from a close observation of real life. It’s a great voice, and voice is one of the great engines of fiction.

So there we are, enjoyably confused, tossed on the sea of the narrative, trying to find our footing in the unstable territory of Tom Kettle’s mind. There is no life raft for the reader to hang onto; no alternative narrator to give us a steer, to outline a sense of solid reality which Tom Kettle cannot give us. But Sebastian Barry goes way beyond this. We are told that Tom visits a single mother who has taken up residence next door with her young son, only for him to revisit her flat to find it uninhabited. We are told of an instance where Tom visits his landlord and his wife, only for it to become clear later in the novel that the landlord’s wife is long dead and the venerable car in which he offered Tom a lift long gone too.

Here I felt that the author had crossed a line; that he wasn’t just describing a mental state but an alternative reality. A reviewer in the New Yorker put it succinctly: ‘Kettle hasn’t simply dreamed these people up; they seem to have an existence independent of his thoughts’. It’s as if Sebastian Barry is suddenly plunging his main character into a different world – it’s as if the confusion about what reality is moves from being confusion on Tom’s part to confusion (albeit deliberate confusion) on the part of the author. Let me be quite clear. This is not just a question of Tom revisiting his past; it’s a question of the author putting Tom into a time or with people of which and of whom he had no prior knowledge.

But together with all this there is also – surprisingly, perhaps – real momentum to the story. In fact the novel could almost read like a policier. The two policemen who turn up at Tom’s house are in a bit of a bind. They want to charge an associate of the murdered priest with acts of sexual abuse of which he is undoubtedly guilty. But the priest suspects that Tom was guilty of the murder of his former colleague, and is determined to make things difficult for them –  if he is going to go down he wants to take one of them with him. And who knows? Perhaps the prospect of indicting one of their own will lead the police to back off. But Tom and the two young policemen are determined to see justice done, whatever it takes – although they would dearly love to leave Tom alone in his retirement.

So the momentum of the story, on one level at least, is derived from the question of what will happen to Tom. Will his crime (although is it really a crime, he wonders) be uncovered? And the sense of momentum comes complete with cliffhanging moments. After an interview with the police in which it is revealed that the accused priest has made specific allegations against Tom, Tom thinks of events as an arrow,  ‘this little floating arrow arcing high in the sky of things now, so high you would be forgiven for thinking it was heading away from you. But it wasn’t. Soon its own weight would check its upward path, and slowly, slowly … it would begin its journey downward. An arc still, but one searching for his heart.’ That arrow, its seeming innocence but its deadly intent, describes the novel’s energy and momentum perfectly.

But a more substantial source of momentum lies in working out not so much what will happen to Tom in the future, but working out what has happened to him in the past. We know when the novel begins that he has been widowed – but it takes a long time for us to learn how his wife died, and the nature of her death makes a real difference to our perception of the story. We only gradually learn that both his son and his daughter are also dead – and again we have to get to near the end of the novel to find out how and why they died. The excitement in the novel comes from getting the reader to work out what has happened in the past, and not just telling them what will happen in the future. This is an author who wants grown-up readers.

In the process of revealing Tom’s back story Sebastian Barry reveals his subject: the systematic abuse by Catholic clergy of children in their care. This brings to my mind Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things like These, which deals with the same subject. I thought Claire Keegan’s novella just slightly underwhelming, and having read Old God’s Time I think I now understand why. In Claire Keegan’s novella the protagonist looks at the events and the abuse from the outside and plans to save a victim. In Old God’s Time Sebastian Barry’s protagonist Tom Kettle has suffered the abuse himself, as has his wife, so it is internalised – he is not just looking at it from the outside. And it’s clear that the real evil that the Church has committed lies in the fact that the stain cannot be washed away; that victims cannot just be ‘saved’. We see in Old God’s Time that the aftermath of the abuse is murder, suicide, and drug addiction cascading down through the generations. Tom and his wife have gone to such lengths to make a loving family home – but they fail to keep their children safe. It is as if the wrongs perpetrated on them are contagious.   It’s an incredibly powerful portrayal of the consequences of abuse.

The ending of the novel sees Tom rescue his (imaginary) neighbour’s son from his abusive father. Poetic justice! you might think. But it turns out that it is just a dream – his neighbour and her son belong to that alternative reality into which Tom seems to slip at intervals. The ending, in other words, seems to hover somewhere, rather unsatisfactorily, I thought, between the real and the dream-like, the symbolic.

But I was so glad to have been treated, as a reader, with such respect; to be given so much to think about; for the writer to assume that I would indeed relish the thinking. And for that, combined with his ability to keep me guessing and to keep me turning those pages; to, in short, maintain such a pace, such momentum, I can only think Sebastian Barry a writer who knows precisely what he wants to achieve and how to do it.

After I had read Old God’s Time I embarked on Michael Cunningham’s Day, the story of two relationships portrayed over three days on three consecutive years. And this author does take his reader by the hand, making sure that everything is made entirely clear: we are given character sketches (as though characters couldn’t become clear through their own thoughts and actions and words); he lays out the feelings between the characters rather than allowing the reader to work it all out for themselves.

The first section – the first day which the author describes – is very workmanlike. The scenario is set out; we flit from character to character in bite-sized sections which allow the reader no opportunity to get bored. But the subsequent two sections fall increasingly flat. Because there is no momentum; no jeopardy; no quandary in which the characters find themselves and from which they have to extricate themselves. It becomes increasingly inconsequential. How did the author manage this?

He also kills off a major character, assisted by Covid. But his death is random and unbelievable (I would have said incredible but that could have been misleading). I have rarely been so annoyed at an author staging a character’s death. And despite this act of authorial manslaughter the author fails to harvest from it anything like plot development. Everyone is very sad that the character in question has died, but it really doesn’t make much difference to their lives.

So there is the difference between these two novels – one managing to combine momentum with subtlety; the other achieving neither. Writing a good story is obviously a difficult thing to achieve.