Old God's Time

This is not, as I have seen reviewed elsewhere, a police procedural. That is like saying beluga caviar is fish eggs. It is true, it is true, it is misleading.

Barry puts us inside the tired, grieving and guilt ridden mind of Tom Kettle, retired policeman, widower, father of two also no longer with him. The equivocation and misdirection of the sensations being felt by our subject are expertly and sympathetically drawn. They are as coherent as they are confused. If that doesn't make sense to you well life often doesn't either and that is much the point here.

The reopening of a cold case into abusive clerics and a visit from ex-colleagues brings dread matters he had half buried scurrying to the surface.

Excellent and recommended.

When we meet Tom Kettle, he is settling into retirement from the police force and obviously grieving his wife, who seems to have died recently. He's visited by two policemen who start to question him about a cold case that he was involved in. Kettle's memories start to surface and bring up many, many questions. His own memory seems unreliable (is he slipping into dementia?) - to himself and to the reader, and some of the characters start to reveal themselves as ghosts. It's clear that some really, really terrible things have happened to Tom and his wife, June, in their childhoods. They were both seriously abused by priests. And Tom's grown children also have stories that need to be told.

The Irish have a way of writing. It is beautiful show more and descriptive and sad and there is often a tenuous divide between the living and the dead. This book is no exception. Barry writes beautifully and masterfully, invoking the beautiful setting of Tom's retirement home, slowly revealing Tom's story and those of his family, and keeping the reader guessing all the way to the very end about what is true and what is false. And in the end, there are still questions, and I loved that.

I had a really hard time with the book, especially in the middle, as some really horrific child abuse is revealed. I didn't really know anything about the plot of this book when I started it, and the topic might have put me off. But, really, the book is so masterfully written that I'm glad I stuck it out.

Recommended, but know that it's not an easy book to read, emotionally. show less

This is an elegiac study of memory, trauma, and grief which is both beautifully written and deeply frustrating.

Old God's Time is set in suburban Dublin in the mid-90s, where retired Garda detective Tom Kettle finds himself rattled by the visit of some younger investigators who are probing a long-ago and disturbing case. Except that Tom—increasingly isolated and ageing—is having bouts of confusion and memory lapses and he's not entirely sure what happened himself. Was he a good cop or a bad one?

Parts of the novel are beautiful: Sebastian Barry has such a deft hand with lyrical prose and command of this kind of stream-of-consciousness style that you could absolutely see, say, Dublin Bay unfold in front of you as he describes it. He show more can sketch in even minor characters with great vividness, and there are some lovely wry asides/observations.

Parts are unsettling: I don't think many people would need a lot of guesses to figure out what kind of scandal would be coming to the fore in Ireland in the 90s. Sometimes the abuse is implied or referred to euphemistically; at others, Barry is explicit and I found myself queasily skimming ahead.

But where Old God's Time works on the small scale—in the prose, in the details—I thought it was less successful on the larger one. There's a danger with an unreliable narrator, and particularly one who seems to hallucinate whole scenes as Tom does, of tipping over the line from "fascinating study of memory and perspective" to "parody of that 'it was all a dream!' storyline in Dallas". Since I could never trust that what I was reading about or that Tom was recalling had actually happened, it was difficult to emotionally connect with the book. This intensified in the last 50 pages or so, when we seemingly learn how Tom's wife died and that both of their children have been dead the whole time, even though Tom's been thinking of them in the present tense. This should be a gut punch for the reader! Except I'm not sure that any of it was "true" at all, because of an anachronism in the description of June's suicide. (We're told explicitly that she died in the mid-80s and that she had just purchased something for which she'd received a 10-bob note in change. Except decimalisation took place in Ireland in 1971 so why would she be getting change in shillings? Unless...) And if this is all just the meanderings of a deteriorating mind, why should I get invested? There's no resolution to it all, no catharsis, and there's something that's bugging me about how the abuse of girls and women gets framed here by a male author through a male POV character.

To put it more succinctly: a book on topics like those covered by
Old God's Time, written by someone of Sebastian Barry's calibre, should haunt you. I don't think it will. show less

Probably the best novel written by Sebastian Barry, an emotionally hard-hitting form of literary retribution for the crimes committed by the Catholic church in Ireland.

Tom Kettle has retired 9 months ago as a copper, settling on his own in an annex to a castle on the Irish coast, not far from Dublin. Nothing much happens in Tom’s life and he is eager to keep it that way, though he cherishes the occasional visits of his daughter Winnie and thoughts of his son Joe, who stays in new Mexico as a medic amongst pueblo Indians. But then two men, 2 Guardia, visit him with a file of which his boss and best friend Fleming suspects Tom knows a lot. Tom sort of scathes the issue, while offering the men food and a place to stay. The next day show more Fleming comes along and they go for a walk.

By then the reader has become aware that something is amiss with our dear old doddering Tom. He cries a lot, for seemingly no specific reason. The encounters he has with his beloved wife June, or daughter Winnie are perhaps imagined, not real, since they are supposedly dead as well. Slowly Tom gets drawn into the investigation of a child abusing priest, who happens to accuse him, Tom Kettle, of killing his child raping colleague. It is clear that the Police does not want to pursue that end of the investigation, whereas it is also clear to the reader that Tom knows more.

Slowly, slowly we get the back story, having to deal with whole episodes of imagined encounters that turn out only to happen in Tom’s head. This is done in such a crafty way that one kind of looks forward to the next episode of ghostly presences. Meanwhile a young woman (McNulty) and her young son, who also stay in the castle, invite Tom in with an urgent request – can he keep an eye out for her child-abusing husband from whom she fled, after losing her daughter to a colonary disease caused by frequent sexual (anal) abuse.

Towards the end we have been told all back stories and it is time for some decisive action (whereby Tom kills the sexually abusive father after the latter abducts the child) and some decisive inaction (the Police refrains from persecuting Tom for his role in the brutal murder of the other priest – by his wife June, who was raped daily between the ages of 6 and 12 by this same Father). It is such a well written novel, and reflects so well on the scandal of the Catholic church in Ireland, that the book is bound to stay with you and perhaps precipitate some tears. show less

Tom Kettle is a retired detective, living alone in a small Irish town. His wife died several years earlier, and Tom’s days seem to be consumed with just getting by. He is thrown off balance when two members of the police force stop by to get Tom’s perspective on a cold case. Their questions bring long-dormant memories to the surface, and most of this novel is devoted to Tom’s internal monologue.

Reading Old God’s Time is like viewing the world through a haze. Tom is not the most reliable narrator, and prone to dozing off. Memories and dreams are commingled. What is fact, and what fiction? Small but important details are revealed without much fanfare. The cold case intersected with Tom’s personal life, the full extent of which show more gradually becomes clear, as do the lives of Tom and his two children.

It’s not a happy story, but it’s a compelling one, brilliantly crafted. show less

When a reader picks up a book reportedly about a retired policeman called upon by old associates to look into an old cold case, he can safely assume that it's going to have a fair amount of investigative police work and maybe even some action. That is unless the reader noticed that the book's author is [author:Sebastian Barry|79510], the Irish author renowned for his dense literary writing style and two trips to the Man Booker Prize short list. This was my first time reading Barry, and it was a real eye opener.
Tom Kettle is enjoying the ninth month of retirement from the police. To him, the whole point of retirement is to be stationary, happy and useless. But to Tom, happiness is elusive. He spends his days in quiet desperation, show more mourning the loss of his beloved wife June and the absence of his children. Barry has placed the action of this story not in the seedy streets of Dublin but almost entirely in the tortured mind of Tom Kettle.
Tom's story is a fascinating one, if not entirely unexpected, full of dark deeds spun by a master storyteller. In true Irish fashion Barry fills Tom's head with profound insights that leaves the reader raging at one moment and weeping the next, reminiscent of the line by [author:Tom Waits|101363] “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” He also includes some more mundane comments that those, like me, who wish to visit Ireland someday will appreciate.

It was a pity that eejit minister in the sixties had decommissioned all the little branch lines of Ireland. Not profitable. But beautiful. Not that Irish governments concerned themselves much with beauty. Stopping the blood flow of visitors to a thousand towns.

Bottom line: Although this book is far from what I expected, I was very pleasantly surprised. I see now why Barry was named Laureate for Irish Fiction. He's obviously familiar with the old Hemingway line about how to write (All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”) as what flows from his pen is no less than the lifeblood of a nation.

Although it's not an easy read, I highly recommend this book and anything else that this author chooses to write. show less

“Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time.”

Set on the Irish coast near Dublin in the 1990s, protagonist Tom Kettle is a retired police detective. Two detectives arrive at his door asking for his assistance on a cold case. A priest has been accused of child abuse, and he has provided new information about the murder of another priest that occurred many years ago. This contact spurs Tom to recall memories he has long suppressed.

The reader soon becomes aware that Tom is an unreliable narrator. He has been traumatized by previous deaths in his family. Tom often has difficulty recalling events accurately and separating imagined events from show more reality. The ending, in particular, may (or may not) change the reader’s perceptions of what has occurred.

Tom is a wonderful character, and it is easy to like him. He is kind and compassionate. He also has a great sense of humor. He loves his wife and family deeply, and this love is an ongoing theme. He wants to protect children from abuse. The plot revolves around harm done to children, some long ago and others more recently. Tom has suffered multiple traumas and tragedies, and the ramifications are revealed over the course of the narrative.

The storyline contains some difficult material – in particular, the sexual abuse of children perpetrated by priests and covered up by the Catholic Church. It also portrays how abuse impacts future generations. Though this book includes grim topics, it is beautifully written. I have read several of Sebastian Barry’s works and his writing is consistently expressive and powerful. I found this book emotionally moving and worth reading despite being extremely sad. show less