A detective thriller like no other, OLD GOD’S TIME surely is a book written for the reason we read.
A haunting narrative, lyrical and disturbing, horrendous and hilarious, a mesmeric tale of memory and menace, a jagged world of revenge, retribution and remedy, instinct comes face to face with intellect in Sebastian Barry’s peerless, priceless prose.
A novel of compelling and terrible beauty, with language so beautiful so carefully and brilliantly executed, OLD GOD’S TIME recounts recently retired policeman, Tom Kettle’s past life to the present.
“And what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, and there was a truth told to him, a truth, in his curious age, in his palpable decay, that there at the heart of it, there at the heart of it, for ever and always, was June”.
And so OLD GOD’S TIME is a love story, so it is, a miraculous monument to amour. But one marred, all the same, by malevolent forces, under cover of cassock and collar, wimple and veil.
“Everyone knew that the whole fucking mess started with fucking McQuaid. Archbishop of ruinous bullshit. Their mutual hunger for the bodies of children, the souls of children assailed by them, assaulted, soiled, threatened with ruin, and their whole lives altered by them, the underground stream of their lives diverted by that cataclysm, the wells of their happiness parched to dryness”.
OLD GOD’S COUNTRY is about Crimen pessimism (the foulest crime),the cataclysm of the catechism, Church sanctioned psychological child abuse, and the physical abuse by cleric, “a filthy dark evil cold murderous vile creature with a penis for a soul”.
Kettle feels himself a pensioned ghost from a strange past, a pointless survivor, where his beloved wife, June “survived everything but survival”.
Yes there is the terrible and the tragic in OLD GOD’S TIME but Barry also supplies succour and solace. There’s a strange privilege in reading this book.
The lovely wildness of it.
OLD GOD’S TIME by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber