In a ramshackle flat on the Irish coast, Tom Kettle – a newly retired detective – spends his days in his favourite wicker chair, smoking cigarillos and staring out to sea. The quiet is a balm for his battered heart (“There were many terrible stories in the world and he had heard most of them”), but his seaside idyll simmers with menace. A neighbour picks off cormorants with a sniper rifle; sewerage pipes pump filth into the water; children play rough, unsupervised games at the shoreline, courting tragedy. The “murderous water” awaits. A reckoning is brewing, Tom can feel it in his bones. It arrives in the shape of two plain-clothes guards who need his help with a cold case. Tom plays the doddery fool and sends them away, but the intrusion unlocks something in him. Old terrors twitch and stir.
Sebastian Barry’s new novel, Old God’s Time, is a tale of long-buried anguish and guarded silences. The narrative thread of Tom’s life is institutions and institutionalized violence: he left a Catholic boys’ home for a stint with the British Army in Malaya, then joined the Gardaí. The ghosts of his past are insistent. So, too, is his love for his late wife, June. Will the ferocity of that love redeem or damn him? Perhaps both. Or perhaps he has already been judged. There are hints that his world may not be as corporeal as it seems. This is a fitting setting for a novel that considers “the long tale of Empire” and “the fecking priests” – a setting equal to the sense of cultural and psychological purgatory.
Old God’s Time is a portrait of a mind sliding into crisis – a high-definition disintegration. We follow Tom through the lonely rituals of his day, privy to every thought and meander; every stray observation and daydream. He ponders lost toothbrushes and toaster crumbs; the aesthetic qualities of a slice of cheese; a colleague’s resilient perm. More than once he extols the depressurizing pleasures of a good fart. It is all evasion. Barry’s soul-weary detective has spent decades papering over his pain – “think [of] everything else before he thought those things” – but his defences can no longer hold. Tom Kettle is a watched pot, ready to boil.
But the more that he deflects, particularly around the mysterious death of his wife, the more his pain becomes a mystery for us to solve. Ever-compassionate, Barry is never glib or reckless with his hero’s anguish, but the grisly details – the hidden truths – begin to feel like something we have earned, a reward for our attention. It is a discomfiting source of narrative momentum and a problem endemic to stories anchored in suffering.
In recent years the subject of trauma has become central to contemporary literature; the question of how to pin human pain to the page. It is more than a question of candour, of deciding which silences to break and which horrors to show. Writers are now frequently building trauma into the shape and texture of their work, mimicking the ways it inhabits the body and colonizes the mind. The result is a literature of evocation and immersion; trauma as subject and form. It can make for some of the most inventive modern fiction, and also some of the most morally queasy. With its ceaseless ruminations, Old God’s Time is an attempt to replicate something elemental about human suffering; it is a restless tale of restlessness. But Sebastian Barry’s interior maximalism is likely to prove divisive. Some readers will find Tom’s voice mesmeric; others will find it maddeningly digressive. Which is to say: there are moments of terrible beauty in this book, but they are largely lost among the farts and crumbs.
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic
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