I already know that this is going to be one of my favourite reads of 2023. The only Barry I have read previously is Days Without End which I loved so was excited to read this.

The novel follows Tom Kettle, a recently retired detective who has spent the last 9 months sitting in a wicker chair, smoking cigarillos, and looking out his window at the sea. When two young policemen come to ask him about an old case it stirs up a maelstrom of memory and historic trauma surrounding Tom, his beloved late wife June, and their two children.

This is the kind of writing that I feel like I am always looking for but I find so rarely. Exquisite prose that immediately submerges you into the mind of the narrator - everything else is forgotten. (Only Hilary Mantel, E M Forster, and Kazuo Ishiguro spring to mind writers who can do this).

Tom's grasp on his own memories feels fragile and, as the trauma of his past bubbles closer and close to the surface, you feel yourself desperately trying to cling on to what might be true. We see the effects of this - shifting Tom's perception of time, clouding every interaction he has with his friends and neighbors with uncertainty and a sense of impending threats that may or may not be there.

A beautiful, sad and graceful novel from an author I'll be exploring further.

This is only my second novel by Sebastian Barry, but it has firmly cemented him in my list of favorite Irish authors. This latest offering, Old God’s Time, is utterly captivating, a hauntingly beautiful blend of exquisite prose and finely wrought storytelling. It wooed me, seduced me, then felled me like a sledgehammer.

Set in a small seaside town on the east coast of Ireland, it is the tale of Tom Kettle, a former policeman, whose peaceful retirement is interrupted when he’s contacted regarding an old investigation and reluctantly forced to recall troubled events from his past.

Tom is a wonderfully complex character, drawn in bold, vivid strokes. A man of routines and contradictions, prisoner to a dark, disturbing past and memories of family loved and lost. His inner monologues are rambling to the point of incoherence but filled nonetheless with a curiously compelling potency.

To read Tom’s story is to be transported into a world blurred by the vagaries of memory and shifting lines between imagination and reality. For much of the novel, the narrative thus has a haunting, other-worldly quality, making it hard to pin down its essence.

Until, that is, we reach a point, where the fragments finally coalesce, the lens snaps into focus, and the tragic, ugly truth is laid bare in all its awfulness. This shift, from nuanced to manifest, is absolutely brutal.

I wept. For Tom, and his wife June. For the shared trauma of their childhoods at the hands of the Catholic Church. And for the appalling tragedies subsequently visited upon their lives.

A disturbing, unforgettable story that carries all the hallmarks of a prize winner.

I've been a fan of Sebastian Barry from my late teens, and it's not unusual for me to find myself with a lump in my throat as I even THINK about what I feel is is greatest work, The Steward of Christendom. I originally read that play a good ten years ago, and finally saw it performed at The Gate Theatre last year.

Old God's Time, Barry's new novel which published this week, reminds me a lot of what I loved about that previous play. Both are about older men (both named Thomas or Tom), retired policemen, who are left only with their memories and regrets, feeling misunderstood by the generations who came later. Both lived strictly by their code of conduct, a galvanizing commitment to uphold honor, while trying and failing to protect fiercely their beloved families. While Thomas Dunne from Christendom recounts to himself his ordinary failings and the change in society from his room in a care home, Tom Kettle in Old God's Time is only nine months into retirement, and has not yet had time to consider the hardships and dark secrets that have led him to sit alone in a flat in Dalkey to live out the rest of his days when two policemen call to his door.

The case that the policemen bring to Tom is an old cold case he investigated years ago, of two priests who were moved from parish to parish but never published for the suffering they caused to young people in their care. The details of this case, and memories of others like this, make this a very hard read in places, and unlike Barry's other books which are focused on national and religious identity and cultural memory, Old God's Time is a reckoning with generational trauma in Ireland, with the Catholic Church who brushed over the horrors so many children faced, and all of the people, policemen included, who were told to turn a blind eye.

I don't know if I can say I loved this book like I have others - it does have the most beautiful, joyful and sad way of rendering the world anew that I love from Barry, and it has a slightly different slant to what I love about his stories - but it's one I will have to sit with and think about over time, and is no doubt Barry at the height of his powers.

Old God’s Time is a stand-alone novel by award-winning Irish author, Sebastian Barry. Now nine months retired after forty years in the Gardai, Tom Kettle lives in the Annex Flat of Queenstown Castle on Dalkey Island. His existence is fairly solitary, frugal and uncomplicated. He sees his landlord, wealthy Mr Tomelty, weeding the garden, and sometimes catches sight of the boy who lives with his actress mother in the Turret Flat, or hears the cellist in the Drawing Room Flat shooting at cormorants from his balcony.

But on a storm-threatening February afternoon, Gardai Wilson and O’Casey come wanting the former Detective Sergeant’s input on their latest case, a difficult and sensitive matter: a priest whose previous molestation case had been quashed by the higher-ups, now to be prosecuted. What they want to know about stirs all sorts of memories Tom would rather not think about.

“Yes, he had grown to love this interesting inactivity and privacy – perhaps too much, he thought, and duty still lurked in him. The shaky imperative of forty years in the police, despite everything.”

Then a special request from his former CO, Detective Superintendent Jake Fleming brings him in to Harcourt Street. He’s asked to share what he recalls of the investigation that he and his meticulous colleague, Billy Drury carried out into a pair of priests in the early eighties. He relates how frustrating it was that the evidence provided by Scotland Yard was passed, on order of the Chief Commissioner, to the Archbishop to handle, with the expected non-result.

Mention is made of what they believe to be a spurious accusation by the priest now under charges, about the murder of his priestly colleague, not long after the detectives investigation. The memories that dredges up, Tom would also wish to avoid. Now a decade widowed, Tom is thrust into memories of meeting his wife, and the confessions, made to each other, of their awful childhoods in Catholic-run orphanages, revelations that bonded them.

It eventually becomes clear that Tom might not be the most reliable of narrators: some of what he relates is definitely imagined. As people, places and conversations trigger long-repressed memories, Tom’s thoughts gradually reveal the truth of events, of a crime unsolved, and the reasons this good man is now utterly alone in a tiny flat surrounded by books still in boxes. “A sort of blossoming sense of relief maybe, that the wretched Fates had done with him. Had noticed his great happiness long ago, and emblem by emblem taken it away from him.”

This story is very much a slow burn: Barry indulges in digressions and tangents that sometimes seem to be unrelated but all add to the rich tapestry of the lives he is describing. In a story that powerfully demonstrates the devastating effect, on so many lives, of the Church’s systemic cover-up of abuse by those entrusted with the care of children, and the power of the Catholic Church, even into high levels of the legal system, over Irish society, Barry gives Tom one final, dramatic act to save a child from that danger.

As always, Barry’s descriptive prose, be it applied to characters or setting, is exquisite: “O’Casey, a long thin person, with that severe leanness that probably made all his clothes look too big on him, to the despair of his wife, if he had one” and “The sunlight stuck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparked, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration” and “he found he couldn’t tidy his frazzled mind” are just a few examples. This is a beautifully written, intensely affecting read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Faber & Faber

5★
“He had not been, he did not wish to go, he was quite content just to gaze out. Just to do that. To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.”

Retirement – happy and useless. It is raining fiercely outside, and Tom Kettle has been sitting cosy at home in his flat, which faces out to sea, watching the boats, and enjoying his solitude. He is reminiscing about his wife, his daughter, and his son.

“It was four in the afternoon and night was creeping in to take everything away till only the weak lights of the lamps on Coliemore Harbour would bounce themselves a few yards out onto the water, speckling the darkling waves.”

But someone has begun knocking on his door. Nobody ever knocks on his door, not in the nine months he has been glorying in his privacy.

“He was beholden to no man, he had earned that. His pension was his gun, his weapon against work.”

The knocking is louder, the doorbell rings, and he can just make out two figures through the glass. He recognises them immediately as the new fellows from his old station. Cups of tea all around and then, finally, they broach the subject.

“‘It’s something that’s come up and he thought, the chief thought, it might be useful to hear your thoughts on it,’ said the detective, ‘and, you know.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Tom, not uninterested, but all the same with a strange surge of reluctance and even dread – deep, deep down. ‘Do you know, lads, the truth is I have no thoughts – I’m trying to have none, anyhow.’

They both laughed.”

The talk meanders, discussing the area where Tom lives now, how the two young men grew up and where, and as they exchange these intimacies, Tom’s mind meanders even more, worrying about what’s coming.

The men say they have reports for him to read, but he says not now. The weather is far too bad for them to leave, so he offers to make Welsh rabbit.

While he potters in the kitchen, we begin to get a sense of what his life has been like and why he may be stalling these men. The next day, he tries to put it out of his mind by walking to the ocean for a swim (which seems more like punishment than respite to me).

“Scimitars of blunt wind flashed about everywhere, swiping at his hat, his hair, his heart.
. . .
A chill rain began, just for his benefit, he thought, oh it would, and soon made free with his coat collar, without a by your leave, and wet the back of his neck, just enough to put him in mortal dread of pneumonia. But by the time he had covered half the distance to the park at the top of the hill, here was the blessed sunlight, suddenly, the rain’s shy sister, not with any heat in it, but a measure of pleasing hope. He thought of those rare summer days when the whole land thereabouts would be oven-baked, every crevice and wide vista crammed with lovely, belligerent heat. Well, he was not there yet.”

I imagine I can hear the Irish lilt in the words as they are written. It isn’t enough to say that Barry’s descriptions are evocative – you have to read them yourself.

That is the overall tone and manner of the storytelling. Tom’s mind jumps from the happy times with June and the children when they were young, and then it suddenly sinks back into the extremely unhappy childhoods both he and June were trying to overcome. His childhood as an orphan left scars.

“Sometimes his head was like a wild horse, without bit or rein. He couldn’t leave it to its own devices. He must be talking to himself, give himself good orders like an officer of a higher rank. A state of mind he had beheld in so many men who had been in orphanages and industrial schools in the army. They had been incarcerated among gradual and impossible torments. Yet oftentimes as a bewildered boy walked out the gates at sixteen, he might shed a different kind of tear, with the new fright of the unknown world before him. Up early, get your grub, obey your commands – the army was something of a tonic, and no war ever seemed to compare with what they had already endured. Nothing again as terrifying as the shadow of a dark-soutaned Brother by your bed, in the deep night, to drag you out either to lather you or f*ck you. No Malayan fighter, magnificent, fearsome and dark, ever as terrifying as the small shopkeeper’s son in his measly garb, given a coward’s power over you by virtue of being at least a grown man. No wonder they released the boys, like knackered greyhounds from the cage, at sixteen, before they gained the muscles and the strength to fell the Brothers with just and merciless blows.”

Send them out the door before they’re too big to control, then for Tom, straight to the army to Palestine and later to Malaya.

“First you had your dress of sweat, only then your uniform. There was never a soldier didn’t sweat in Malaya, there was no such creature.”

The exceptional rifle skills he developed in the army stood him in good stead with the police recruiter, so there he stayed, a loyal policeman, for forty years. He does not want someone knocking on his door. He does not want to read the old police reports. He does not want to remember the bad old days.

“In the old days, when wives were bloodied and beaten, you were not to go further than the front door. Ah yes. You could check if a person was still breathing, but no more. A child of the house could be lathered into a state of utter distress – you had to leave that alone too. You learned these rules off the station sergeant, off the tough detectives. The lowliest of men were kings of women.”

He couldn’t possibly talk to today’s young police about such things.

“Couldn’t say why the contents of those reports assailed him even before he could read them. Couldn’t read them, couldn’t in any sense read them. Under any circumstances read them.”

The story of his family unfolds gradually, as Tom’s mind slides between reality, memory, imagination, and dreams. There is darkness and despair, but over all of that, is Tom’s undying love for June and Winnie and Joseph.

At some point while reading this, I remembered that I had learned the term “kettle” in a mystery when someone found themselves “kettled” in a dead-end alley. It seems to be used in policing to mean “corral”, when they form a cordon around people for crowd control.

I have no idea if the author intended this connection, but it seems apt. Tom Kettle has only ever wanted to cordon off the bad actors and protect people – the innocents – to keep them free from harm. All he wanted was love and justice and being with his family.

I thoroughly enjoyed this interview that the author did in 2019 with another great Irish author, John Boyne, who is a favourite of mine. It was this interview that convinced I must read Barry. It’s a delight to listen to them both. Barry’s other interviews are there as well.
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2019/0121/1024230-watch-sebastian-barry-john-boyne-in-conversation/

Many thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber for the copy for review. I’m looking forward to reading more of Barry’s impressive, award-winning body of work.

There are very few writers who are as adept as Sebastian Barry at combining harrowing acts of violence with moments of exquisite tenderness and grace. 'Old God's Time' perhaps showcases these extremes more fully than any of his previous novels I've read.

We follow the thoughts of retired Irish policeman Tom Kettle who is visited in his new home (a lean-to attached to a castle by the sea) by two of his former colleagues asking for his help in investigating an old case. The nature of this case - and of the help that is required - are only gradually revealed to us, but we fairly quickly discover that it is connected to the abuse of children within the Catholic church. We also start to realise that Kettle's grasp on reality is not always entirely secure, and much of the suspense of the novel comes from unpeeling his false memories and fantasies in pursuit of the real truth.

Barry does not shy away from graphic descriptions of sexual violence and the novel burns with a righteous anger at the extent of this evil and at the collusion of those in the highest positions of power. However, this is coupled with an incredible sense of humanity which emerges in the relationships Kettle forges with others - from the fierce bonds of love between him and his family, to the simple everyday courtesies exchanged with neighbours, colleagues and even strangers which affect Kettle profoundly. Almost every character in this novel seems marked by trauma, loss or solitude, and yet it is a novel brimming with gentleness and kindness. One of the most powerful scenes involves one character confiding her traumatic childhood experiences to another, a conversation which is inescapably brutal yet also intensely moving in the response of her confidant and the connection that is created between them.

As ever, Barry's writing is sublimely lyrical but in an unshowy and entirely readable style. This is a gorgeous novel which confronts big ideas with courage and beauty. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

“Haunting, exquisitely written and makes your soul ache”
Retired policeman, Tom Kettle, is starting a life of retirement in a small place attached to a castle type residence with some intriguing neighbours. He's after a quiet life as in his life and career he has had a lot of "drama" .

He hopes to live with fond memories of his beloved wife June and their two children. However other memories begin to surface and intrude after two serving detectives visit to ask him about a case from the past.
His past and present collide .
It's written in an interior monologue style with Tom's memories and thoughts being gradually revealed and the plot being character driven.

The Irish history of abuse by priests is featured in this book. It's very shocking in places and moved me to tears. As I said in my "caption" it made my soul ache for Tom and his family primarily but also for all those other survivors of abuse.

Parts of it reminded me of James Joyce. Poetic with a distinct Irish flavour, it's certainly a movingly powerful book. I give it a rare 5 stars- I only award that rating to exceptional books. Barry is in the "premier" league of writers.

It’s hard to know what to say about a book that is at once so beautifully written but so harrowing to read. Each time I picked it up I was caught up by the lyricism of the prose as we gradually get to know Tom Kettle, abused orphan, soldier, policeman and most uxorious of widowers.

As the tragedy of his story unfolds we are drawn inexorably to a conclusion we don’t want revealed. We want a happier ending for this man and his family who have suffered so much so valiantly.

The horrors of child abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church are sparingly but graphically described and the damage it inflicts across the generations is sadly far too in evidence.

No doubt some people will point to Tom’s unreliable narration - he is a man who sees ghosts and who experiences them in ways that make us doubt what he tells us. If we cannot believe whole episodes and conversations, then can we believe any of his story? I don’t have an answer but your heart tells you that it feels true.

Would I recommend this book? I really don’t know. It broke my heart to read it. Does it deserve all the superlatives it will surely garner? Absolutely

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Old God's Time
by Sebastian Barry

A gut wrenching story that explores the legacy of the most shameful secret in Ireland's history, clerical child abuse. So much non fiction has addressed the structural systems that created and managed and perpetuated and concealed and denied the beating and rape of little children, but Barry uses a fictional account to examine the lasting mental effects of having your childhood stolen, your innocence destroyed, your body violated, your right to safety and security desecrated by those entrusted with your care, then the further damage of disbelief when you took the gigantic leap of faith and tried to access help or tell your story. What kind of an adult can you become with every ounce of agency, dignity, self esteem stripped from your bones?

Written in lyrical, stream of consciousness style, we tap into the very soul of Tom, a newly retired Detective Garda in Dublin as he is approached by former colleagues to help in an old investigation. His narrative is completely unfiltered, obviously struggling to decipher fact from fantasy, memory from dream. It takes a few chapters to get into the swing of the writing, but knowing and trusting this author paid off for me.

Fabulous sense of place, Dublin at it's finest, from Dalkey to Deansgrange, Harcourt St to Phibsboro, St Stephen's Green to the Phoenix Park.

This is a tough and challenging read with horrifically triggering subjects. Prepare for this and you should be rewarded with a truly unforgettable experience.

Publication Date: 2nd March 2023
Thank you to #netgalley and #faberandfaber for the egalley

Award winning Irish author Sebastian Barry deals with the stain on his country’s soul in his latest book Old God’s Time. But he does it in a round about way, taking his time to get there and delivering plenty of regret and tragedy along the way.
It is the mid-1990s and Tom Kettle is a retired policeman and former soldier living on his own in one of the outbuildings of a fake castle on the Irish coast. His solitude is broken by two young policemen sent by his former boss and colleague to ask him about a cold case. The details of that case and Tom’s involvement in it unravel slowly over the course of the narrative. But they open up a well of memory of Tom who starts to review his life and the many tragedies that have led him to this place and time. In doing so, though he will forge some new connections and find himself re-engaging with life, even as his grip on reality starts to slip a little.
Old God’s Time is a compassionate story of a man trying to come to terms with his past. Barry takes readers deep into Tom’s psyche so that the boundaries between reality and his imaginings sometimes blur. But the past is fixed, and as it is slowly revealed, the impact of the abuse of children by the clergy and by family members becomes a pernicious and pervasive theme, one that led to intergenerational trauma. Barry does not hold back in these descriptions, unveiling the horrors that were covered up for so many years.
Old God’s Time is a character study but Barry effectively uses the tropes of the crime novel (a cold case investigation, evidence and witnesses) to give it an inexorable structure. Revelations lead to reminiscence lead to more revelations lead to action. It is both carefully observed and compelling, Barry being careful to pay off all of the secrets that lie on the surface in the opening few pages. But is also an important opportunity to reflect on a massive injustice that was known but buried and had ongoing consequences for the people affected and their families not only in Ireland but in many other parts of the world.

Barry really is one of our finest writers and I think this novel may be his best in years. Profound, deeply moving and incredibly well-drawn, I fell in love with the characters.

I’ve read and enjoyed some of Barry’s previous novels but alas, this one wasn’t for me.

The story of recently retired detective Tom Kettle, a widower and a bit of a recluse. A visit from a couple of local police to ask his advice on an old case they are investigating brings to the surface his troubled past and secrets that he has lived with most of his adult life.

Sounds interesting enough so far right? Well I’ve no problem with the premise, it’s the way the story is told that I found jarring. The whole story is told from Toms point of view. His every last irrelevant and insignificant thought at any time written on the page for us to wade through. It just ruined any sort of storytelling for me. Just as things begin to get interesting we wander off for two or three pages again of Toms thoughts and the moment is gone.

There is a surrealism to the whole thing which I’m sure the author meant and it’s hard to know what is and isn’t real but at the end of the day I just couldn’t connect at all with the characters or the writing style. I mean there is so much inane musings from Toms mind that are mind numbingly boring that I’m sure he himself wouldn’t want to read them.

This all plays out to the back drop of the very serious issue we have had here in Ireland with clerical child abuse but that’s lost here really in this writing structure. Paragraphs are at a premium here. The pages are usually a wall of text and I find little if anything interesting or engaging about that writing style.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC through Netgalley.

Retired police officer Tom Kettle has settled into his solitary retirement when an unexpected visit from two serving officers shatter his peace.
This is beautiful lyrical wrirting at its very best; it swirls around the subjects, lapping at details then ebbing gently away. It was very easy to become engrossed although at times the subject matter and memories are bitter.
As Tom absorbs his recollections, the reader is treated to a personal insight of moving prose.

This the story of Tom Kettle, recently retired from police service, and now renting a simple apartment attached to an old stately home. It doesn't take Sebastian Barry long to draw us Tom's traumatic orphan childhood during which he suffered many of the abuses that the priesthood is all too often accused of perpetuating. But he survives, and ultimately makes good serving 30 plus years as a respected detective. Through Tom's backstory we learn of the tragedies and loss that also occurred in his own family which, in an ever-darkening plot-line are compounded by the opening of a cold case which brings two detectives to his door.
It is difficult to say more without revealing too much but, suffice to say, Barry's writing skill is pitilessly grim in exposing the dreadful damage done to children by the priesthood and how it impacts on future generations.
There is no comfort to be found at the end of this novel but we are left marvelling at how Tom contained his anger within himself and always sought justice for others.
Many other authors could come up with a similar theme and merit 3 or 4 stars, but very few could develop it with the superb, at times lyrical, descriptive prose Barry brings to each page. So 5 stars it is!

A beautifully written story and a thought provoking picture of what constitutes ’usefulness’ and if we can ever really retire.

All I would say is that the pace of this novel is relatively slow - it took me a while to get through those first few chapters but, once you do, you will be rewarded!

Tom Kettle is a cleverly portrayed unreliable narrator. His mind seems to slip and drift from his memory to his present time - forgetful or perhaps needing to forget.
This is a melancholic story of loss and of lives damaged by clerical child sexual abuse and its cover-up by both the church and the authorities however in the hands of Sebastian Barry the tale isn't bleak. From the perspective of a retired policeman, himself an abuse survivor, Barry masterfully unwinds this story of love, revenge and retribution with this impressive novel.
Fans of Barry will take great pleasure in his return to Ireland, and his themes of family and trauma anthough readers looking for a straightforward thriller and a more conventional style should look elsewhere. Barry's beautiful and lyrical prose and slowly drawn-out story are superb and his readers will also enjoy Tom Kettle's incidental encounter with a member of the McNulty family.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I love Sebastian Barry's writing however, although this as a page-turner, theme-wise, it is a dark and difficult read.
An excellent but harrowing read.
Thanks to NetGalley, Faber & Faber for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

Sebastian Barry has been at his best for many years now, and Old God’s TIme is another example of his ability to create a world richly populated by interesting yet enigmatic characters, who lead interesting lives and whose doings are described in marvellous prose.

Tom Kettle is a recently retired senior Garda (Irish police force) officer, whose previous service with the British Army in Malaya gives him access to experiences such as few of his former colleagues could have had. Yet he has a Garda mentality in many ways, too. John Banville’s Snow comes to mind early on. But clearly, Kettle’s mind is deteriorating and, while there has been a period of bliss during his time with wife June and the rearing of their children, his good times were sandwiched by very bad times.

In fact, his ability to go on is confronted early in the novel until he gets visitors who are still serving Gardai and wish him to give advice on a reopened cold case. Then, like. Denis Lehane’s Shutter Island, the reader is led along a ledge where a form of logic applies that may not always intersect with conventional logic or memory processing.

But it’s not just an old man reminiscing or misreminiscing; the joy of young love gets ample space and the terrors of childhoods in the religious institutions that brutalised Irish society shakes out the cosiness that a former colleague ascribes to Kettle’s post-retirement circumstances.

A pleasure to read.

As an Oldman of 94 yrs living with memories of yester year, readig sbout Yom's doing the same although well written is of no interest.

I really enjoyed Old God’s Time. It’s not the book I expected. From the description I thought it would be a sort of literary crime novel. It’s something quite different. The references to the unsolved case simply serve as a backdrop for this powerful story about memories, life, loss and how people cope in different ways. The visit from the colleagues cause Tom to get lost in the past as his memories and emotions start to intrude more and more. The book as a surreal, dream-like quality which is very effective so you never know if the events are memories or fabrications of a sad, lonely old man. This is a powerful read.