Old God's Time, by Sebastian Barry
Irish author Sebastian Barry’s new novel, Old God’s Time, is a searching mystery of betrayals, secrets, and the ripples of damage they do. This is not action driven like a Mission Impossible film or a Jack Reacher novel. It has more in common with one of Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn novels: driven by character, set close to home (Ireland’s coast in this case). This is not a wrist-snapping page-turner, but a story with which to take your time. You’re going to want to pay close attention: there are roses in the rubble here.
A word of caution: this book deals with some reprehensible behaviors against children with some harrowing, but not gratuitous, particulars.
Tom Kettle is a widower and a recently-retired police detective. Nine months into retirement, he receives a visit from a couple of young detectives seeking his help with a long-unsolved murder. (Old detectives never retire for long.) They are pursuing a case against a local pedophile who was a colleague of the murder victim. He has made certain allegations. Tom is torn between his duty to his colleagues and his community, and a secret he is keeping.
It’s Ireland. Everyone – Tom, his colleagues, his wife June, their grown children, his landlord and neighbors – has lived with the hard bony parts of life. Tom “knew there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife.” He was “the guardian of his own silences, had been all his life.” The Irish have long been an occupied country and people. They’ve seen their most cherished institution, relied on to give them comfort in violent times, betray them in the most heart withering way, generation after generation. Almost everyone was either abused or knew someone who was, killed in guerrilla warfare, or knew someone who was. And so many knew abusers, and had trusted them. Occupied and betrayed. For decades.
Be patient. It may feel like a lot of scene-setting at first. But soon you’re going to wonder if you’ve been paying close enough attention. Sometimes Tom’s reminiscences, like our own ruminations, step through streams of consciousness. Sometimes they float downstream a bit.
What does it feel like to be a cop, a father, a husband, in such a society? Where your every role is rich with the expectation of being a protector, but you live in a society where so many have been betrayed by supposed protectors. How do you . . . detect . . . when surrounded by survivors with secrets they must keep? When you’re a secret-keeper, too? How does a person, much less a community or a society, heal while keeping such secrets?
Sebastian Barry enables us to hear the thoughts of a man hobbled by grief and rage, whose mind and heart are tattered, like shredded sails, by the force of all that has pounded him. Barry is one of those writers who can paint portraits of characters, warts and all, and leave you thinking, well, that’s just the way people are: we have our strengths and weaknesses, temptations to which we succumb, character flaws. We know such people. They’re friends and family. Tom Kettle is no omnicompetent male in the Liam Neeson/Tom Cruise/Iron Man tradition. He’s hero as wounded neighbor. Not the trusted representative of an institution; just the retired colleague, the husband, father, next door neighbor. That guy.
The mystery is how any of us survive, and for how long, all the repeated betrayals – not just of ourselves, but of those we love. Sometimes we are defeated. Sometimes we find an opportunity for redemption. For atonement.
This review is dedicated to Shuhada' Sadaqat/Sinéad O’Connor, who survived so much, for so long, and who stood watch and gave warning. Wounded. Imperfect. Trustworthy.