01/02/2023
In the knotty latest from Barry (A Thousand Moons), a retired police officer’s solitude is disrupted by a decades-old case involving sexually abusive priests. Tom Kettle, 66, has been off work for nine months and is living on the property of a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea when two detectives arrive asking about the priests. Kettle spurns their questions, but after they leave, his mind is frazzled. He thinks his daughter has visited, then remembers both of his children are dead, along with his wife, June, whose memory he “cradled... as if she were still a living being.” Distraught, he attempts suicide but is interrupted when the police chief arrives to request his help with the case. It turns out one of the priests died long ago, and the police are interested in what Tom knows. As he begins cooperating, he remembers that June told him she was raped as a young orphan by a priest. Tom’s struggle with his failing memory makes the gradual reveals about June and their children all the more unsettling, and the mystery of his connection to the case involving the priests all the more intriguing. The gorgeous writing and unreliable narration make it hard to put down this rewarding take on love and grief. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, RCW. (Mar.)
Praise for Old God's Time:
“I find Old God’s Time powerful enough to want to bang the drum and say as loudly and clearly as I can that Barry ought to be widely read and revered—he ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere . . . Reading his novels is like braving Irish weather: You’re chilled and drenched and dazzled and baked in buffeting succession . . . lyricism and drama jostle in nearly all [Barry's] sentences . . . paragraphs unspool like spells, dreamy incantations . . . You should be reading Sebastian Barry. Ireland’s fiction laureate has a special understanding of the human heart.” —Adam Begley, The Atlantic
“Few contemporary writers have done more with the natural resource of Irish English, or with the buried tensions at the heart of Irish identity, than [Barry] . . . A writer of almost Joycean amplitude, Barry never segregates and comic and the tragic . . . What’s striking about Old God’s Time is the scrupulous realism that Barry brings to his outlandish premise—and his guileful refusal ever to clarify what kind of novel we are reading . . . Barry’s [prose is] casually exquisite.” —Giles Harvey, The New Yorker
“Few can write like Sebastian Barry, there is a real thrill as each sentence unfolds. Old God's Time is a portrait of a good man facing the failings of his past. It is wonderfully alive because Barry is so attuned to the human condition, to the poetry in ordinary lives. Full of love and grief and heartache, this is an unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers.” —Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
“[A] sublime study of love, trauma, memory and loss . . . What elevates this novel is Barry’s sustained, ventriloquial, impressionistic evocation of a unique living consciousness . . . The ending is a tour de force of transcendent power and complexity. I don’t expect to read anything as moving for many years.” —The Guardian
“[A] stunning novel . . . Barry has always had a gift for creating memorable characters, and Tom is one of his most fascinating ones . . . Old God's Time is a powerful, painful novel, another excellent offering from Barry, who is clearly one of the best Irish writers working today. It's also a book suffused with a deep moral anger that refuses to let go of the crimes that destroyed the lives of so many.” —NPR.org
“Enthralling . . . Long acclaimed as one of the foremost storytellers of his generation, Barry is a writer whose novels treat expanses of history with great delicacy, warmth and lyricism . . . Barry excels at creating texture, character and atmosphere, but in Old God’s Time he gives us prose so completely suffused with the outlook and professional rhythms of his protagonist that the sentences land like an extension of Kettle’s central nervous system.” —Financial Times
“Heartbreaking . . . Barry’s ninth novel coheres as an attentive character study, an engrossing crime story, and an unsparing lament for Ireland itself.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A gem of a novel . . . Barry matches a fearless eye for the merciless realities of life with an effortlessly poetic touch . . . There are moments in Old God’s Time that will take your breath away . . . a meditative, mournful masterpiece, with the pace of a whodunnit.” —Sunday Times
“A skilfully disorientating narrative . . . at once a story of Ireland’s reckoning with the horrors of institutional abuse, and a moving portrait of a man who, despite the worst ravages of loss, miraculously retains a capacity for love and joy.” —New Statesman
“Rare indeed are those novels worth cherishing and keeping close. Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time is one of them . . . a masterful mystery from Ireland’s Thomas Hardy.” —The Telegraph
“Admirers of Claire Keegan and Niall Williams will appreciate the Irish humor that masks deep sorrow [in Old God's Time]. This novel’s words are well chosen, the sentences dazzle, and they all come together in a beautifully told, piercingly sad story.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Barry masterfully explores the 'deep deep chaos' of Tom’s perforated soul with poetry, poignancy, and a splash of indignant rage. The classic crime-story chestnut—a mothballed cop yanked back into action—becomes a parable of grief and theological anguish, a contemporary Irish answer to the book of Job.” —Booklist
“The gorgeous writing and unreliable narration make it hard to put down this rewarding take on love and grief.” —Publishers Weekly
Praise for the work of Sebastian Barry:
“Barry’s novels give us lives, not plots . . . Every one of his novels is luminous. Not one of them sounds like anyone else.” —Robert Gottlieb, The New York Review of Books
“One of the best writers in the English language . . . [Barry’s] soul-wrenching narratives and incantatory prose . . . are powerful canvases of the human spirit.” —The Washington Post
“Nobody writes like, nobody takes risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.” —Ali Smith, author of Autumn and Companion Piece
“Sebastian Barry's handling of voice and cadence is masterly. His fictional universe is filled with life, quiet truth and exquisite intimacy; it is also fully alert to the power and irony of history.” —Colm Tóibín
“[Barry writes] in language of surpassing beauty . . . It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night.” —The New York Times
“Barry’s lens is so cohesive, so gracefully rendered, that his words have the stony allure of the Irish poets and the lyrical pull of an epic storyteller.” —The Boston Globe
★ 01/01/2023
In this latest from Costa-winning, two-time Booker Prize finalist Barry (Days Without End), Tom Kettle's quiet seaside existence, nine months into his retirement from the police force, is upended by a knock on the door. Two young detectives from his old squad have come to consult on a cold case regarding the death of a priest, on which Tom and his former partner were the lead investigators. A subsequent visit from the police chief, his former colleague, indicates that Tom may be more of a suspect than a collaborator. As the mystery unfolds, secrets and ghosts come to haunt him. Having been raised and abused in a Catholic orphanage, he eventually found happiness with an adored wife, herself an orphanage survivor. But his years as a husband and father are behind him as he struggles with an unreliable memory to uncover the past and to help a troubled neighbor escape her violent husband. VERDICT Admirers of Claire Keegan and Niall Williams will appreciate the Irish humor that masks deep sorrow. This novel's words are well chosen, the sentences dazzle, and they all come together in a beautifully told, piercingly sad story.—Barbara Love
★ 2023-01-12
This complex quasi-mystery centers on a former cop’s reckoning with the damage caused by sexually abusive priests.
The narrator is Tom Kettle, a 66-year-old widower living in Dalkey, Ireland. He’s nine months into retirement from a decorated career with the Dublin police when two Garda officers ask him to look at reports from an old unsolved murder case he worked on years earlier. A priest under investigation for pedophilia has made disturbing accusations regarding the murderer. Kettle, whose wife and two adult children suffered brutal deaths in the previous 10 years, is already coping with too many memories, unwanted and otherwise. Much of the narrative is a very accessible stream of consciousness. Even as Kettle's mind drifts, he also must deal with the hard realities that arise from police procedure, like evidence gathering, interviews at headquarters, and the suspicions of his former boss. The unsolved case crucially turns his thoughts to the first night of his honeymoon and his wife’s “sorrowful revelations” of childhood abuse: “The rapes, the bloody priests.” It’s her abuser who was murdered. The novel avoids any pat responses to questions of crime and punishment, although even the dutiful cop in Kettle leans toward rough justice where the young are involved. Barry is a resourceful Irish writer with a gift for empathy and lyrical prose. Many of his novels weave Irish immigrants into the broader tapestry of global history in the past two centuries. But Kettle’s story hinges on domestic events, on years of priests’ sexual abuse of children in Ireland. Barry’s tight focus on one retired lawman and the ghosts bedeviling him provides a compelling sense of the misery the Catholic Church knew it was causing and failed to salve.
An eloquent, affecting take on pedophilia.
There are moments in Old God’s Time that will take your breath away…[Barry] has crafted a meditative, mournful masterpiece, with the pace of a whodunnit.”
Stephan Hogan is the ideal interpreter of Sebastian Barry's thoughtful, multilayered novel. His clear, soft Irish accent pulls listeners into the mind of Tom Kettle, an Irish policeman retired to a coastal village who is asked to re-examine a cold case involving abuse by the Catholic Church. It's soon apparent that Kettle's isolation and the case are linked, and that it's not just human visitors who come by to talk. Hogan celebrates Barry's often transcendent prose, savoring the words without wallowing. He handles shifts in perspective and reality with an ease that reduces confusion. And his characterizations are subtle yet distinct--not so much different voices as evocatively different personalities. In Hogan's performance, Kettle is Job, beset with grief yet touched by grace. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine