Old God’s Time
On the back of Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry’s 11th novel, a blurb by Robert Gottlieb reads, “Barry’s novels give us lives, not plots…Every one of his novels is luminous. Not one of them sounds like anyone else.” Yup, yup on that “lives, not plots” commentary — and actually, I wrote about this very idea many years ago for The Curator after reading my first Barry novel. (It was Annie Dunne, purchased at the Dublin Writers Museum … here’s the piece.) These days, I’m more often than not drawn to “plot-less” books — books that mine emotion and motivation instead of relying on “and here’s what happened next” storytelling. But, as laid bare in that essay, I initially found reading a novel like that kind of jarring.
That said, I couldn’t get that Gottlieb quote out of my head while reading because Old God’s Time feels fairly plot-driven — at least in the beginning. Tom Kettle is a retired police officer, attempting to seek some sort of closure or solace south of Dublin after his wife, son, and daughter die — all in separate instances. He is visited by two younger officers as they re-open a case that Kettle had been assigned to years earlier. So, yeah, at first blush this feels like a James Patterson thriller or something. But no, it’s Sebastian Barry, and things take a literary and somewhat elusive turn as Kettle’s memories merge with dreams, hallucinations, and misremembering. The epigraph at the beginning of the book is from the Book of Job: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?” Indeed, unicorns in some fashion pop up a handful of times.
Old God’s Time is really a book about childhood trauma and, specifically, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland (so be forewarned); one can find the “plot” to these stories in newspapers and other fact-based media. Barry instead gives us the “lives,” and I’m sort of intrigued that this approach felt novel to me back in 2012. (Maybe I should write some metafiction about this…it would be “lives, not plots” of course.)
PS: Old God’s Time was a Booker long-lister this year, but didn’t make the short list cut. I’ve only read one on the short list, and tbh I wish I could switch the two…
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