Old God's Time, Sebastian Barry

Read by The Bookshop Book Club, Monday 30 September 2024

In which we wonder about truth - within the book and in the Publisher's blurb

Notes from Helen Scott

There was a mixed reaction to Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time from the Book Club last night. This was partly my fault. After the gritty stories we had found in Antony Penrose's Lives of Lee Miller (non-fiction) and Richard Kelly's Black Eden (fiction) I thought we deserved something lighter, and chose Old God's Time whose back cover blurb called it "a beautiful important book", "gorgeously crafted", "rare indeed are those novels worth cherishing and keeping close. Old God's Time is one of them".  'Light' it is not. 'Worth cherishing and keeping close' - questionable. This is one of those books whose beautiful cover, blurb and effusive reviews were not totally true to the book itself.

Tom Kettle is a retired policeman who's retirement is disturbed by the re-opening of a case he had been involved with, involving the murder of a catholic priest. And there's the rub. Nowhere on the cover was there any intimation that this beautifully crafted work concerned the Magdalene Laundries and the scandals involving the Irish Catholic Church. Mea culpa. I should have read the reviews and not trusted the Publishers who hid in plain sight the horrors which sit at the heart of this book: child rape and prolific child abuse.

Old God's Time is a beautiful treatise on the way in which childhood underpins our adult lives. Tom's wife June was abused as a child. Despite a happy and fulfilled adult life her story does not have a happy ending. She 'survived everything except survival' (230). Barry writes beautifully about love. Romantic love, parental love, love for the world around us - animate and inanimate. There are laugh aloud moments and moments when we were as muddled as the narrator himself appeared to be. We had some discussion as to whether Tom Kettle was suffering from dementia or PTSD (the nurses were pretty sure it was PTSD), either way this is a story about memory, and about pushing our traumatic memories deep down to places where we hope we may never find them again. 

"Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. The things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old god's time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they're gone. Maybe old god's time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wrist watch. But that didn't mean it could be summoned back, or should be." (166)

It is also a story about the way our memories fail to stay true to themselves, mixing and muddling, overlapping with each other until we are unsure anymore what is really the truth.

"Is it OK to think a book is brilliantly written, but really not enjoy it?" asked one member of the group.  Another, who said it had spoiled her holiday (a common theme), was off home to read it again, and one member who had not yet read it borrowed a copy and was looking forward to getting started.  However, everyone now knew what they were up against. Reading, or re-reading, will now involve a chance to luxuriate in Sebastian Barry's wonderful words and phrases, in the form and in wondering why such an accomplished writer has chosen short static sentences at some moments, and long, long paragraphs at others.  However, we should all have known that there was trauma in this book at the start - and that is surely the point of a publisher's blurb. And perhaps the job of a Bookseller choosing a book for book club.  As I say, Mea Culpa. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is next (28th October, 6.30pm) - copies will be in the shop at the end of the week.

Helen Scott