I’ve long wished to read a novel by Sebastian Barry and somehow not got to one until now.

Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the 2023 Irish Book Awards, Novel of the Year (winner announced 22 Nov).

This is a slow burn, introspective, literary read, of a man in decline, in the 9th month of his retirement from the Irish police force, now in his late 60’s. He has relocated to the annex of an old castle-like building overlooking the Irish sea and rarely has contact with anyone, though he is aware of his elderly landlord weeding the garden, a young woman with a child in the turret of the same building and a lone, trigger happy cellist.

His thoughts are of his wicker chair, his view, his peaceful existence and the joy of the privilege he has had to love his wife June, who he believed loved him in equal measure.

Over the course of the next week or so he relives memories of being with his wife and we develop a sense that this good fortune was not something either of them expected from life, given their rough beginnings, both abandoned as babies or small children.

His nostalgic meanderings are disturbed by a visit by two young policemen working a case against a priest, and looking into the cold case of another murdered 20 years ago. They want to know what he remembers from that time, as it was a case he worked on. Their arrival also coincides with the beginning of tentative relationships with his neighbours.

What a thing to bring to your old friend’s door. A new peril of cold cases that he had never foreseen. Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch.

The visits disturb and awaken old memories and feelings, going all the way back to his early days in the army, a year in Palestine and then in Malaya, where he was a sniper and other dark shadows of memories long buried.

The slow revelation of his past, of his job and family, his son and daughter, his wife and their experiences as children create intrigue as he alludes to disturbing events that take time to unveil.

His often-time confused mind sometimes makes those memories feel like events happening in real-time around him; people appear to him who are no longer here. Figments of imagination or angelic attendants preparing him?

Sometimes he awakens and realises it was a dream, other times he realises it was a form of hallucination.

But he was obliged to believe it. Because in the first instance a witness should be believed. A lot of mischief and mischance had arisen from not believing witnesses. Rejecting out of hand. Poor soul standing in front of you, spilling the dreadful beans, and it not sounding likely. But oftentimes the unlikely was the truth, as you might find out, in the end, when it was too late. He felt he should believe – believe himself.

We read and we are in his mind trying to decipher what is real and what is imagined or desired. At a certain point it doesn’t really matter, except that the two young policemen may suspect he is implicated in something.

Far from being depressing or exhausting, given the burden of what he has lived through, there is a sense of gratitude for the gift of a shared love he had with June and pride he has in his children.

Behind the plot is a seething rage at the years long refusal to follow up with child abuses nor charge priests suspected of child abuse, men covering the despicable deeds of other men, of one type of power enabling another, predators against the weak and helpless and the long term psychological distress this trauma has inflicted on hundreds of thousands of children, not talked about but passed on through their own DNA, becoming a form of collective trauma of a generation(s).

The lack of redemption for victims, the theft of their freedom, of their peace of mind, the deep wounds that remain, that continue to fester, to destroy souls.

It was up to him now to know less about times and details and more about the moiling mysteries of the human heart. Things happened to people, and some people were required to life great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed, and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure.

Setting the novel in this man’s twilight years takes a dramatic subject and allows it to be reflected on in slow paced, methodical way that combines the experiences people go through and witness, the effects and consequences that they continue to live with and attempt to overcome or heal from, or take revenge for and the aftermath, what survives.

Brilliantly written and rendered, thought provoking, holding its threads of hope and faith in the power of genuine love. It is a book that is worth immersing in due to its dream-like reality, an ideal weekend read.

Highly Recommended. Have you read any Sebastian Barry novels? Do you have a favourite?

Sebastian Barry, Author

Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet, one of a small group of authors to have been nominated for the Booker Prize five times.

The 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, Barry had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), before Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023.

He has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

Barry was born in Dublin in 1955, and now lives in County Wicklow.