Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time

 Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time (Faber)

For quite some time now I've not been able to hear the word 'righteous' without it meaning 'self-righteous' to me. Increasingly, it's hard not to hear 'priest' without it meaning 'abuser'. That might not be what it is intended to mean but, like 'decimated', it is losing its proper meaning, not by being mis-used but by becoming freighted with associations.

One can sense some of what is going to happen in Sebastian Barry's bleak novel. In a way we have been prepared for the way that the past hangs heavily over later events, in Ireland, in James Joyce and William Trevor to name but two. 

Tom Kettle is a retired detective called in to help with an old, unsolved case. For a while we can't be entirely sure that it's not him that's the suspect.

It unfolds slowly at first and I'd be by no means the first to admire many things in Barry's prose narrative way of showing, not least,

The city was lying under a huge dark belly of cloud, like a child reading a book under a blanket, except there was poor light enough for the city to read by.

At first the suicide attempt at the end of chapter 2 seemed a bit melodramatic but by the end it doesn't look so out of place. The mortality rate is high, though, accelerating towards the end like Hamlet and one wonders, as one does with Graham Swift, if fewer deaths might make death less commonplace and more significant. The blurb on the back that says 'Barry writes about unconditional love better than anyone' the reviewer has ever read and Tom certainly adored his late wife but that is diminished by how grim the rest of it is and, more than love, it is about time,

Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into 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 wristwatch. 

But it would appear that time isn't quite that big and things can't be buried in it.

Like a deep, dark, Catholic Midsomer Murder, Old God's Time produces an unexpected murderer in its quickening climax. Not every reader will see that coming.

There's precious little solace to be taken from the story beyond its brilliant writing. I'm not quite as keen as I thought I'd be to see what else is to be found in the Barry back catalogue because I fear it might all be so relentlessly true. Grief, and abuse, spread like uncontrolled vegetation and thrive by not being expressed or going unreported. I suspect that other Sebastian Barry books are likely to come with the same, or other such, difficult messages but the quality of his writing makes him worth at least one more chance before I decide, no, I know but I've heard enough.