Skip to main content

Old God's Time

 Book Review


Title: Old God's Time

Author: Sebastian Barry

Publisher: Faber & Faber, London, 2023

Pages: 261

Much of our personality is shaped in our childhood. Traumatic experiences can distort one's personality irreparably. Thomas Kettle (Tom), the protagonist of Sebastian Barry's latest novel, is one such person whose very soul was wrung out by the Christian Brothers (a Catholic congregation of ascetics) in whose orphanage he grew up. These Brothers abused him sexually.

Old God's Time is not a psychological thriller, however. It is a metaphysical novel that explores the impact of our early memories on our later life and the ineluctable subjectivity of reality. Tom is 66 when the novel begins. He is a retired police detective who was earlier in the British army. He has now chosen to live in a relatively secluded place overlooking the Irish Sea. Memories don't leave him alone, however, and his memories aren't any kind to him.

Tom has had a catastrophic life like the biblical Job. The epigraph of the novel comes from the book of Job. The Old God of the title could as well be Job's God whose love is as heartless as it is binding. But the Oxford Reference instructs us that the phrase 'old God's time' refers to 'a period beyond memory.'

Tom's memory is pretty unreliable. But we know for certain that he was abused sexually as a boy by the Brothers. It is also certain that his wife June was raped repeatedly by a Catholic priest from the time she was just six years old. For six long years, he raped the child. "His kisses," June tells Tom, "his fu©king kisses. His yoke inside me like a burning poker, do you know how much that hurts when you are a little girl?"

June is making a sort of confession to the man whom she loves dearly, her husband. But is it she who sinned? Memories cloud not only your perspectives but also your judgement. Tom knows that and more. Wasn't he a victim of and witness to something similar? He remembers the many souls that were "put out like a candlewick in the sea of lust... He had seen it with his own eyes, the boys the Brothers were raping, with the light in their eyes put out."

Tom's love is not enough for June to endure the agony of her haunting memories. Some scars are incurable and they eventually carry you to your grave all too soon. The people you get around you in your childhood do matter.

June crumbles too soon. Worse tragedies descend on Tom's personal as well as professional life. Tom is another biblical Job enduring much. There are too many scars in his soul. Tom is overwhelmed by the haunting memories. Do these memories cloud his perception? Tom wonders more than once whether he is going mad.

Ms McNulty is a character we meet in Tom's neighbourhood. She ran away from her husband who drove their own daughter to her cruel end. McNulty is yet another of those people who endure horrors but can't talk about them. So many sad stories lie untold in human hearts. But is McNulty real? Is she a creation of Tom's roiled mind?

Tom's mind has been thrown into such turbulence by the appearance of two of his young former colleagues from the Garda, who want his help in investigating a new case involving two Catholic priests. After all, Tom has a long association with the religious.

But Tom doesn't want to remember them, the priests. Yet the novel is much more than about clerical pedophilia. It is a complex work that compels you to return to the pages you have already read. It carries a bewitching "lovely wildness" in it.

PS. All quotes are from the novel.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I have this on my TBR wishlist - ta for the review! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is a book I cannot read. I can't deal with the topic. I don't deal well hearing about other people's pain, especially pain like this. But there are plenty of people who appreciate this sort of novel.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It isn't a theme that anyone will like. But the evil needs to be looked at and Barry does it as sensitively as only a good writer can.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...