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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New Yorker , Washington Post , NPR, and Kirkus Reviews
"You should be reading Sebastian Barry. [He] has a special understanding of the human heart." -- T he Atlantic
"A prose stylist of near-miraculous skill. . . Barry reaches deep into the messenger bag of mystery fiction and turns the whole business inside out . . . marvelous." -- The Washington Post
"An unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers." --Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
From the five-time Booker Prize nominee and 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, a virtuosic, profound novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets
Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return of his family: his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
A beautiful, haunting novel in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
Author Notes
Sebastian Barry is a playwright whose work has been produced in London, Dublin, Sydney, and New York. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland, with his wife and three children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the knotty latest from Barry (A Thousand Moons), a retired police officer's solitude is disrupted by a decades-old case involving sexually abusive priests. Tom Kettle, 66, has been off work for nine months and is living on the property of a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea when two detectives arrive asking about the priests. Kettle spurns their questions, but after they leave, his mind is frazzled. He thinks his daughter has visited, then remembers both of his children are dead, along with his wife, June, whose memory he "cradled... as if she were still a living being." Distraught, he attempts suicide but is interrupted when the police chief arrives to request his help with the case. It turns out one of the priests died long ago, and the police are interested in what Tom knows. As he begins cooperating, he remembers that June told him she was raped as a young orphan by a priest. Tom's struggle with his failing memory makes the gradual reveals about June and their children all the more unsettling, and the mystery of his connection to the case involving the priests all the more intriguing. The gorgeous writing and unreliable narration make it hard to put down this rewarding take on love and grief. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, RCW. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
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. Old God's Time has something in common with the western, with Kettle its upright, unravelling gunslinger Kettle is an even more unreliable narrator than Roseanne McNulty was in The Secret Scripture. We learn that he and his beloved wife, June, were grievously entangled with a murdered priest, whose death is being re-examined. Old God's Time has something in common with the western, with Kettle its upright, unravelling gunslinger, motivated by a conversation he and June had on their wedding day, as she prepared to reveal the abuse she had endured as a child. "'Tom, will you forsake me if I tell you?"¿ "Forsake. Never! I will never, he said." (An echo of Gary Cooper's High Noon can be heard in that "forsake".) As Kettle pieces together his tale, he understands the need to avenge graphic wrongs. A frontier style of justice occurs more than once. The book's moral sense is absolute. The fairytale aspects of Old God's Time - there are unicorns and ghostly children - and its dreamlike logic can frustrate and deliberately confuse: more than one descriptive passage is undermined by Kettle waking from sleep. The facts, too, become increasingly hazy, allowing for suggestive, symbolic imagery. Kettle's nine months of retirement are likened to a pregnancy, for instance, while a rendition of Kol Nidrei, associated with the "day of atonement" in the Jewish calendar, acts as mood music, thanks to Kettle's cellist neighbour. Ultimately, Old God's Time is an at times woozy rendering of unstable memories and the difficulty in telling your story as it disappears "into old God's time", as well as a tribute to enduring love and its ability to light up the dark.
Kirkus Review
This complex quasi-mystery centers on a former cop's reckoning with the damage caused by sexually abusive priests. The narrator is Tom Kettle, a 66-year-old widower living in Dalkey, Ireland. He's nine months into retirement from a decorated career with the Dublin police when two Garda officers ask him to look at reports from an old unsolved murder case he worked on years earlier. A priest under investigation for pedophilia has made disturbing accusations regarding the murderer. Kettle, whose wife and two adult children suffered brutal deaths in the previous 10 years, is already coping with too many memories, unwanted and otherwise. Much of the narrative is a very accessible stream of consciousness. Even as Kettle's mind drifts, he also must deal with the hard realities that arise from police procedure, like evidence gathering, interviews at headquarters, and the suspicions of his former boss. The unsolved case crucially turns his thoughts to the first night of his honeymoon and his wife's "sorrowful revelations" of childhood abuse: "The rapes, the bloody priests." It's her abuser who was murdered. The novel avoids any pat responses to questions of crime and punishment, although even the dutiful cop in Kettle leans toward rough justice where the young are involved. Barry is a resourceful Irish writer with a gift for empathy and lyrical prose. Many of his novels weave Irish immigrants into the broader tapestry of global history in the past two centuries. But Kettle's story hinges on domestic events, on years of priests' sexual abuse of children in Ireland. Barry's tight focus on one retired lawman and the ghosts bedeviling him provides a compelling sense of the misery the Catholic Church knew it was causing and failed to salve. An eloquent, affecting take on pedophilia. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
His attempted retirement upended by the reopening of an old murder case, a troubled detective clings to memories of love. Alone in a shack overlooking the turbulent Irish Sea, Tom Kettle tries not to have any thoughts. In this he is unsuccessful. The ghosts of his beloved wife, June, and their two grown children, all three now dead, persist. Police officers from the old station, investigating a new lead into the death of a monstrous priest, pay Tom a visit. They want his professional perspective but also a sample of his DNA. Tom's tenuous hold on reality, tethered to minor routine and the rhythms of an unattached pensioner, gives way to dreamlike reveries of longing and loss. His days fill themselves with the humiliations of aging and the interventions of the dead. Barry (A Thousand Moons, 2020) masterfully explores the "deep deep chaos" of Tom's perforated soul with poetry, poignancy, and a splash of indignant rage. The classic crime-story chestnut--a mothballed cop yanked back into action--becomes a parable of grief and theological anguish, a contemporary Irish answer to the book of Job.
Library Journal Review
In this latest from Costa-winning, two-time Booker Prize finalist Barry (Days Without End), Tom Kettle's quiet seaside existence, nine months into his retirement from the police force, is upended by a knock on the door. Two young detectives from his old squad have come to consult on a cold case regarding the death of a priest, on which Tom and his former partner were the lead investigators. A subsequent visit from the police chief, his former colleague, indicates that Tom may be more of a suspect than a collaborator. As the mystery unfolds, secrets and ghosts come to haunt him. Having been raised and abused in a Catholic orphanage, he eventually found happiness with an adored wife, herself an orphanage survivor. But his years as a husband and father are behind him as he struggles with an unreliable memory to uncover the past and to help a troubled neighbor escape her violent husband. VERDICT Admirers of Claire Keegan and Niall Williams will appreciate the Irish humor that masks deep sorrow. This novel's words are well chosen, the sentences dazzle, and they all come together in a beautifully told, piercingly sad story.--Barbara Love
