Sebastian Barry’s new novel, “Old God’s Time,” reveals itself to be a Möbius strip of a book, in which the “real” plot is slowly superseded by a paranormal one.
The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers? At a bare minimum, the list would have to include Swift, Sterne, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Beckett.
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 Sebastian Barry, who made his name as a playwright before emerging as one of Europe’s leading novelists. To open one of Barry’s books is to be hit by a great gale of talk. In “Days Without End” , the talker is Thomas McNulty, who has fled the Great Famine of the eighteen-forties and come to live in the United States.
It is typical of Barry, a writer of almost Joycean amplitude, that this essentially tragic tale should be packed with moments of comedy and joy. In the midst of death, Willie and his comrades are very much in life, singing and joking and telling stories. Willie is a gifted singer who has made a specialty of Schubert’s aria “Ave Maria.
This state of affairs persisted until the nineteen-nineties, when the Church began to lose its theocratic grip on the state. It was a time of reckoning in Irish public life, and Kettle soon finds himself caught up in it. At the start of the novel, his solitary existence is disturbed by an unannounced visit from two former colleagues. They want to know what he can tell them about an unsolved case he worked on in the nineteen-sixties, involving two priests accused of sexually assaulting children.
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