Old God’s Time

Sebastian Barry

Faber, £16.99

Review by Neil Mackay

 

THERE’S much talk today within the worlds of psychotherapy and biology of what’s called epigenetics and the science of “transgenerational trauma”. The notion runs like this: if my mother was severely traumatised before my birth, perhaps by war or abuse, then I too may have some mark left within me genetically of that great suffering. Maybe that renders me more prone to depression or alcoholism.

Those troubles passed down to me from my mother may in turn leave a mark on my children, who will leave a mark on their children. And on it goes: family pain as DNA. Like the poet Philip Larkin said: “Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as quickly as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

Epigenetics and “transgenerational trauma” is a nascent scientific field, up there with artificial intelligence.

Who knows what this new discipline may one day tell us about the secrets of the human soul? Sebastian Barry, in his new novel Old God’s Time, anatomises the inherited pain within families – indeed, entire nations – as an artist rather than scientist, in a work of astonishing agony and beauty.

Old God’s Time tells the story of Tom Kettle – and doesn’t that name summon a sense of bottled up, roiling pressure – a retired Irish police detective and the awful secrets and loss of his family’s history. “It was a story of atrocities, certainly,” Kettle says of his life.

In truth, Kettle is a broad metaphor for Ireland. We meet him at the end of the 20th century, not long after he’s left the force, as the nation prepares to slough off the cruel, abusive control of the Catholic church.

Both Tom and his wife, June, experienced horrors at the hands of the priesthood as children, horrors which Barry, at times, unsparingly describes.

Only a novelist of Barry’s mastery could render such scenes with an elegance of prose belying the ghastly brutality of what was happening to children at the hands of a clergy which felt it owned Ireland and its people.

The love between Tom and June, though, leavens the horror, with heart-stopping beauty and tenderness. Bonded in pain as adults, the pair settle old scores with one particularly loathsome priest. “Who will speak for the child?” Tom soliloquises like Hamlet. “Who will act?”

Long after June’s death, however, their past revenge returns to haunt Tom. Indeed, the ghosts of the past are very real, very present in the life of the old, troubled detective, giving the book a modern twist of Hibernian Gothic.

The crimes committed against Tom and June as children – the mental and physical scars inflicted on them by men of God – leave dark fingerprints on their own children, Winnie and Joe; the trauma passed down; the abuse inflicted on one generation tarnishing the next.

Think of Ireland even now. We imagine my country free from the church’s sins, secular and liberated, but there are many older folk still very much alive, yet ruined by priests and nuns.

“The little wicks of their eyes put out,” as Kettle says of Ireland’s damaged children. The wounds of these survivors – survivors like Tom and June – bleed into society still. The trauma and pain can’t be, and isn’t, forgotten. Generations will pass before the stain of clerical abuse truly lifts from Ireland.

There’s something of ancient Greek tragedy about Old God’s Time – that title even evokes a certain deep, mythic past. Tom and June’s daughter Winnie, in particular, freights a story that harks back to Antigone, the child of Oedipus, destroyed by events which took place long before her birth.

Yet most of all this book is Irish through and through. Barry, a writer strewn with awards, is best known for his haunting novel, The Secret Scripture – another story of Ireland’s sins and the suffering of its people. He’s the laureate of the history of his homeland throughout the calamities and upheavals of the 20th century.

One passage towards the end describes Tom as he becomes submerged in the horror of the past: “He was like the falcon breaking from the spell of the falconer, going higher and higher, going away into the ether, breaking the non-existent thread that bound them.”

The lyricism and dread is a direct homage to The Second Coming by another great geographer of Ireland’s soul, WB Yeats. His poem The Second Coming opens: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Now, if I’ve made this novel sound unremittingly dark, then I ask Barry to forgive me. There is some light in the Stygian depths of cruelty which he explores, and that light comes from Barry’s style.

It’s not quite stream of consciousness – a technique which can often render a work unreadable – but we are right there at all times inside Tom Kettle’s mind, and Tom Kettle, as befits a symbol of Ireland, has the gift of the gab. He’s wryly, mordantly funny.

Here he is describing “the Irish people. Poor stragglers stuck on the edge of Europe. Took a wrong turn on some ancient landscape. Could go no further and could not go back”.

Kettle will describe a colleague’s face thus: “His mouth all to one side like the town of Loughglynn.”

It’s the authentic voice of working-class Ireland, rooted in that desert time between independence in 1921 and the social liberation that began to take hold at the millennium.

Sometimes I thought I could hear my own older relatives, now long dead, talking to me from the past with their funny turns of phrase, sad poetry in their every expression.

Must I find a flaw in this novel? Critics are meant to do so, aren’t we? I offer this reluctantly, as I’ve nothing but praise for this dark beauty of a work: Barry does perhaps hold his cards – his revelations – too close to his chest for too long.

It is only in the final few chapters that the confusing fog around Tom and June’s past starts to clear and we see the full agony of what took place.

But listen, walking in that fog towards that resolution is a remarkable journey. Nobody can sing of pain and grief with such power, such glory even, as Sebastian Barry.