There is a kind of writing so rare and accomplished that it seems to erase the very nuts and bolts of its own construction. Reading it can produce an experience that feels close to miraculous. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels have it, for example; Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Light Years by James Salter also spring to mind. It’s not merely a matter of technical mastery, though of course that’s a prerequisite. It can feel as though something sublime, almost uncanny, is going on.
In Sebastian Barry’s new novel it is the mid-1990s and widower Tom Kettle has been retired from the Garda for nine months. He spends his days sitting in a wicker chair in a slightly squalid flat annexed to a Victorian castle in Dalkey, smoking cigarillos and looking out to the Irish Sea, bobbing with fishing boats, and an island busy with cormorants. He is not unhappy, though his habits are ossifying and his life has lost all force and momentum; he is certainly lonely, although he perhaps hasn’t let himself understand that. That loneliness is clear in his longing for a visit from his daughter, or the eagerness with which he greets the unexpected appearance of Wilson and O’Casey, former colleagues in Dublin who have come to ask for his help with a case they’re working on.
