Sebastian Barry’s new novel, which kept me in good company over a long weekend when I needed it, introduces us to Tom Kettle, a recently retired policeman who is living with death. He’s 66, so he’s not all that near his own death, though at that age, all have seen it close enough. “To lose your mother. It kills you, then you have to live on.”
Other than that, it seems at first that Tom might be suffering only those warnings of mortality that are lined up for all men. “The big change after sixty he had noticed was not just rising to piss at night, but a hundred other intimations of infirmities ahead.” (Getting up during the night to pee is an occasional theme; the reader can only speculate whether Barry, who is of a similar age to Tom, is writing from life.)
But what we soon learn is that Tom has had a greater amount of death near him than most; far more than his fair share. His daughter, son and wife are all gone. “He wished Winnie – but Winnie was dead. Why did he talk as if she were still alive? Winnie was dead. Joseph murdered in Albuquerque. His wife June, dead, dead.”
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Then suddenly, near the start of his story, Tom is on the verge of another death – his own, self-inflicted – driven by a resigned desire to join his loved ones. But there is an interruption at the door – he is knocked awake, even with the noose around his neck – and “the world was asking him to step back into life. Oh, again, again.”
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The ambiguity in those last three words is crucial. Life pushes and pulls Tom simultaneously. He is driven more by memories of the past than hopes for the future: later in the book, taking a train journey, he observes of the landscape of Ireland’s coast that “some of the best bits were behind him”.
For most of its length, Old God’s Time is a book of memory, and memory can be hard as well as comforting – sometimes, as Tom recognises, hard because it is comforting, reminding us of what we’ve lost. He attempts a sanguine style – “These were the gifts given to him in his life, there was no reason to mourn or complain” – but nonetheless can’t help but divide his life into Before June and After June. Time heals but it also distances us from the people we loved. “Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time.”
There are, as we might hope for from Barry, passages of great lyricism which set the size of the love – “oh the heat of her, yes, the furnace, the mad beauty of that, the wild enjoyment” – against the weight of the consequent grief. “It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.”
Old God’s Time, because of what happens to June and to Barry’s children, is at times a very dark book but it’s too warm to be a bleak one. And it is not without comedy, which Barry renders in his idiosyncratic style. When Tom accidentally gets a severe haircut, his head “just seemed like a flat, failed loaf” – “I will go walking round Ireland and return when it grows back, he thought.”
But the knock on the door jolts Tom back to the present, and two former colleagues come in, though the “questions about a decades-old case” the blurb mentions aren’t one-last-rodeo for a retired cop. The purpose of the visit is tougher than that, and nastier, leading to things that are secret and potentially shaming. “The press would love it anyhow, if they ever got wind of it. Getting wind of things, as Tom knew, was what made the world of Ireland go round.”
The secrets when they come are on the one hand shocking, because of their brutal details, but also predictable because it’s a topic about 20th-century Ireland that’s been well explored. Nonetheless, Barry does it justice. It’s at this point that readers who came to Barry through his last two barnstorming novels, Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, might have been wondering what happened to his recently discovered gift with plot – well, it’s coming.
Indeed, the speed with which developments happen in the closing stages of the book – four deaths (perhaps more) in 50 pages – starts to defy plausibility. Does Barry get away with it? I think he does – the cocoon of language with which he creates Tom’s world has a magical effect, gathering the reader up willingly and, if not exactly softening the blow of the terrible things that Tom has witnessed, then at least giving them richness and depth. That’s the thing about Barry at his best – he makes you believe.
