Sebastian Barry has been acclaimed as a novelist, playwright and poet, twice winning the Costa book of the year for his novels The Secret Scripture and Days Without End, and serving as laureate for Irish fiction from 2018-21. It’s heartening, then, to see him continuing to take risks, as he does in his new novel, his 11th. Here, Barry’s cogent, often glossy prose looks to reproduce the backtracking of false testimony, feeding the reader dead-end leads and disinformation.
Its protagonist and narrator, Tom Kettle, is a retired policeman living among the gothic wilds of the Irish coast in a lean-to attached to a Victorian castle. He’s “the orphan of his former happiness”; a crushing set of personal losses – his wife and two children are dead but hauntingly present – having left him isolated and confused. His hard-earned peace is disturbed when two former colleagues knock at his door, asking for help on a cold case concerning “the fecking priests”. Barry’s introduction of this shameful chapter of recent Irish history, the covered-up crimes of the “empire of the Irish priesthood”, which caused so much suffering to infants in its care, energises his stately writing, resulting in a book that addresses the impact of trauma on memory.
Kettle is an even more unreliable narrator than Roseanne McNulty was in The Secret Scripture. We learn that he and his beloved wife, June, were grievously entangled with a murdered priest, whose death is being re-examined. Old God’s Time has something in common with the western, with Kettle its upright, unravelling gunslinger, motivated by a conversation he and June had on their wedding day, as she prepared to reveal the abuse she had endured as a child. “‘Tom, will you forsake me if I tell you?”… “Forsake. Never! I will never, he said.” (An echo of Gary Cooper’s High Noon can be heard in that “forsake”.) As Kettle pieces together his tale, he understands the need to avenge graphic wrongs. A frontier style of justice occurs more than once. The book’s moral sense is absolute.
The fairytale aspects of Old God’s Time – there are unicorns and ghostly children – and its dreamlike logic can frustrate and deliberately confuse: more than one descriptive passage is undermined by Kettle waking from sleep. The facts, too, become increasingly hazy, allowing for suggestive, symbolic imagery. Kettle’s nine months of retirement are likened to a pregnancy, for instance, while a rendition of Kol Nidrei, associated with the “day of atonement” in the Jewish calendar, acts as mood music, thanks to Kettle’s cellist neighbour.
Ultimately, Old God’s Time is an at times woozy rendering of unstable memories and the difficulty in telling your story as it disappears “into old God’s time”, as well as a tribute to enduring love and its ability to light up the dark.
• Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
