“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

 “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry:

It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, freshly retired from the Garda spends his days sitting in a wicker chair in a small flat annexed to a Victorian castle, smoking cigarillos and contemplating the Irish Sea, the bobbing fishing boats and a small island busy with cormorants. His life has lost force and momentum and, although he is not unhappy he is certainly lonely. He longs for a visit of his daughter and certainly welcomes the surprise visit of two former colleagues from Dublin who come for advise and help on a case they re-opened.

Tom has a great love in him, for his dead wife, June, for most of humanity, for nature, the butterflies hibernating in his bedroom and even for his furniture, he respects the “intimacy of inanimate things“.

Tom is a sympathetic person but not a reliable witness, his thoughts are full of grief, he survived more than one blow and disaster in his life and not everything he experiences or remembers, the reader slowly finds out, can really have taken place. His inner world is a mix of sorrow and sadness but also a great sense of humour. 

Tom, we slowly learn, clearly is the victim of the corroding effect, trauma can have on memory and thought. Trauma inflicted on him and his wife and a lot of other people in those dark times when the holy church had a fierce reign, power and authority in Ireland. The subject of the book is quite clearly the condemning retribution of priests and nuns who abused the power they had over the most innocent and fragile members of society which had been put into their care, the children. 

We accompany Tom Kettle on his way in life, how he was passed from one orphan institution to another, was abused by priests, how he served in the army and was forced to kill in Malaya, how he experienced more trauma in Dublin, now a cop, during the trouble, the time of the bombings, how he finally met his wife June who experienced similar abuse in her childhood, how they married and had, for a while, a very happy family life with two lovely protected children. Then disaster sets in and Tom is uprooted but does not loose his strong sense of justice and morality. 

The book is a powerful play on hazy unstable memories and the upholding of personal narrative as life slowly descends into oblivion.

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