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.
