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.
Two things become clear very quickly: one is Tom’s overpowering and unspent love, not only for his dead wife, June, but for most of humanity, for the butterflies hibernating in his bedroom and even for his furniture – he avoids turning the light on when groping towards the bathroom in the night, lest he intrude on “the privacy of inanimate things – so deeply coveted by them”. The other is his unreliability as a witness: grief-stricken, and a survivor of more than one disaster, not everything he experiences or remembers can really have taken place. Barry skilfully leads the reader gently and slowly into Tom’s imaginative world, a place of great humour as well as great sadness, crowded with old memories and new impressions; and the miracle is that the organising intelligence in this fictional interiority never seems for a moment to be that of Sebastian Barry, but of his creation Tom Kettle himself.
Even on second reading it is hard to unravel the “true” story of what Tom has experienced, and this is entirely cognate with the corroding effects of trauma on memory. It emerges that both he and June were raised in Catholic institutions, and that both were survivors of childhood sexual abuse; although what Tom recalls consists of fragments, the sheer scale of his inexhaustible pity for his wife and for all hurt children tells the clear story of his own damage. The depth and strength of his bond with June, and their fierce, restorative love for their own two children, was born of that darkness, a riposte to it that proves, eventually and heartbreakingly, not to be up to the task. Old God’s Time is far from the only work of Irish literature to grapple with that grim legacy, but it may prove to be among the most powerful.
Tom passes, as many did, from one institution to another and joins the British army, which sends him to Malaya and forces him to kill, not once but scores of times, a moral injury from which he has not recovered. More trauma arrives in the 1970s in the shape of an Ulster Volunteer Force bomb attack in Dublin; one of the first on a scene of carnage, he trembles afterwards for a week. Later in his career he is awarded a medal for bravery after taking a bullet aimed at a young woman, an act he clearly sees as reparative in some way. The more time we spend inside the wayward, bruised yet playful mind of this gentle and funny man, the more we realise he’s endured – and the more miraculous it seems that he’s not quite broken yet.
As Wilson and O’Casey continue their investigation into a priest long suspected of abuse, but to whom the higher-ups in the Garda and church have until now turned a blind eye, they begin to uncover troubling evidence that could lead to the loss of even the small measure of safety that Tom has managed to amass for himself. And yet, even knowing that, he is driven to help them – by his grief, by his guilt and by his own moral code.
All of this could make a good story in another writer’s hands; what elevates this novel is Barry’s sustained, ventriloquial, impressionistic evocation of a unique, living consciousness, which at times takes flight into immersive transports of thought, feeling and memory in which nothing is fixed beyond the simple lodestar of Tom’s love for June. In terms of plot this serves a vital purpose, keeping the ground under our feet unsteady; on the level of emotion, it leads to an identification with Tom so close as to feel utterly, overwhelmingly true. The ending is a tour de force of transcendent power and complexity. I don’t expect to read anything as moving for many years.
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.
