A powerful indictment of the Irish Catholic church | Review of Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time, longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, follows protagonist Tom Kettle's unreliable memories and observations. It explores the catastrophic impact of trauma on individuals, as Tom, a retired police officer, is confronted with an old case that brings back painful memories. Through exquisite prose, Barry unravels the calamities of Tom's past, including sexual abuse at the hands of priests. Old God's Time is a powerful, but painful read, and a deeply empathetic portrayal of trauma. Be prepared to be a companion of Tom's wandering mind.

Sebastian Barry’s novel Old God’s Time — which missed out on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist — is risky format-wise. The story is told from the viewpoint of the protagonist, but as the pages unfold, it is clear that his observations and memories are untrustworthy.

A tormented soul who has spent his entire life trudging from one unimaginable tragedy to another, 66-year-old Tom Kettle’s stream of consciousness is sometimes real and at other times imagined. This can leave the reader nonplussed and even frustrated. But perhaps such a risk is necessary for the subject at hand. By drawing the reader into Tom’s affected mind, the novel underscores the catastrophic impact of trauma on individuals.

Tom does not appear unhappy at first. After retiring from the Garda Siochana, the national police service of Ireland, he settles into a lean-to addition at a fake castle in Dalkey, north of Dublin. He is content to sit on his wicker chair, listen to the sounds of the sea, observe cormorants, and smoke his cigarillos. The whole point of retirement, he contends, is “to be stationary, happy and useless”.

But his peace lasts only nine months, “like a pregnancy”. Barry sets the tone for what is to come. It is only four in the afternoon, but the sea outside is “copper-dark getting scrubbed over bit by bit by worse darkness”. Two policemen from the Garda arrive unannounced, seeking Tom’s help with an old case that he is reluctant to revisit. Tom is unsettled, even “terrified”, by their presence. When they tell him about the case, about “priests in the sixties”, Tom is alarmed. He cries, “Ah no, Jesus, no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.”

But when the policemen leave the next morning, he feels the loss like a “bereavement”. And who knows the weight of bereavement better than Tom, who has lost his beloved wife June, his daughter Winnie, and also his son Joe?

Slowly, Barry unravels the calamities of Tom’s past in exquisite prose. June and he are no strangers to priests; more specifically, to sexual abuse at the hands of priests. Tom grew up in an orphanage of the Christian Brothers. He remembers how the boys were raped until “the light in their eyes [were] put out”. June recounts how she “was about two feet tall” when she was first assaulted, while the rapist was “tall as a giraffe... with his big yoke like a rod of steel”.

The story is an indictment of the Catholic church and of the failure of the religious, political, legal, and judicial system in Ireland which left thousands of boys and girls terrorised for decades. Love binds Tom and June; trauma is their shared secret. And when trauma tears the family apart, it leaves grief, but also love — abundant and unspent — in its wake.