OLD GOD’S TIME, by Sebastian Barry
The opening of Sebastian Barry’s new novel, “Old God’s Time,” invites us to imagine we are at the start of a detective story. One detective, Tom Kettle, on the first page; three detectives by Page 5. And not just any old detective story but that darling of the genre, the cold-case review.
By the end of the first chapter, however, we are warned off. The novel is written in the third person, though securely from Kettle’s point of view. As we wait to discover what old villainy has brought two younger detectives to disturb Kettle’s retirement, his snug hideaway on the Irish coast, we are caught in the sideways sliding of his mind, and a constant deferment of the revelations we expect. Something to do with priests? The visitors need Kettle’s help and present him with reports, “dreary accounts of wretched allegations.” They stay the night and are gone at first light, much to Kettle’s relief. Whatever this matter is — and he certainly knows more than we do — he wants no part of it.
The novel has an epigraph drawn from the Book of Job: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?” Kettle is Job — the put upon, the tested, the long-suffering — though we learn only quite late in the novel the full extent of his misfortunes. He is also “job,” for though retired, he remains, always and importantly, a detective, a member of the guild, of those who see more than is good for them.
As for the unicorn, it plays a slippery and puzzling role. It appears twice, the first time in a corner of Kettle’s landlord’s drawing room — objet d’art rather than breathing animal — and then again on the beach below Kettle’s flat during a burst of hectic action near the conclusion of the novel. What is it doing? It seems to signal something significant about the book’s terms of reality. A unicorn (for most of us) exists in a world of dream, of otherness. How much of Tom Kettle, his comings and goings, should we take as belonging to that world? I was reminded of Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman,” which is also full of uncertainty as to who is alive and who is not. This gives to Barry’s novel a kind of shimmer and motility some will find attractive (I did), and others a source of frustration.
