Reflections on Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Reflection on Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry – ***contains spoilers***

What Booker-related titles do you love that evoke specific songs or musical compositions? Are the musical connections explicit in the texts or associations you made while reading? One song invoked in Old God’s Time is “Kol Nidrei”:

Old God’s Time (2023) by Sebastian Barry broke my heart. The text contains multitudes. It’s a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice tale; a meditation on the afterlives of terror; an uncovering and concealment of the uncanny; a testament to the necessity and irrepressible impulse of confession; a window into the unreliability of memory and into the degenerating, demented mind; the return of the repressed; a narrative of haunting. Actually, a modern retelling of Job would be the last thing I’d call it, so I’m glad in this instance that I didn’t see the epigraph – “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?” (Book of Job) – until after I had finished it.

As I read Old God’s Time, I overlaid the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden as glosses and hermeneutic aids.  

Death and the Maiden asks the question: after the torture regime has officially ended, if a torture survivor encounters her torturer, how will she respond? Will she seek revenge or justice? Will her goal be to exact pain, to extract a confession, or something else? And who can blame her? If the state’s justice system corrupts and perverts justice into a travesty, what is to be done? There’s a parallel between the emissaries of an abusive state, as in Pinochet’s Chile, Rios Montt’s Guatemala, and Videla’s Argentina, who torture and terrorize the people for political purposes, and the emissaries of God who torture and terrorize children (the body politic’s powerless and voiceless) simply to gratify their lust and sadism. Both sets of torturers abuse their positions of authority and power over others, are publicly revered and privately feared, become sadistic Jekyll/Hyde figures, and enjoy impunity. Old God’s Time asserts that Ireland’s collective trauma of childhood abuse at the hands of priests cannot remain repressed; the horrors reverberate and continue to haunt the present, engendering afterlives. Has this collective abuse in Ireland been publicly addressed and redressed? Have repair and restitution been made? Please forgive my ignorance.

This is an Orpheus and Eurydice tale. Tom Kettle descends into the abyss / underworld (Sheol in the Hebrew Bible) for his beloved when he accompanies her to the mountain to hunt Father Matthews. He believes that in killing, June will finally heal from her private pain, and Tom will be able to save her from the engulfing darkness. Turns out, the killing neither kills her soul-killers, nor punishes them, nor redeems June from her mental hell (232). As the narrative progresses, we see that Tom’s addled mind confuses timelines and stories; ghosts are as immanent and present to him as the living. Over the years, Tom’s recollections of his own experiences have blended with June’s stories of her experiences; the boundaries of the individual self have dissolved to merge with the beloved. As a detective and an empath, Tom has also absorbed other stories of violence and cruelty; he has absorbed too much pain. Self-preservation leads him to compartmentalize and repress all the violence, but the repression itself causes his dementia and lost grip on reality. Buried secrets need to be unearthed so that Tom may bring closure to his life and reunite with his beloved; the truth will out; the pain needs an outlet. The same goes for June: her electric pain needed an exit or discharge path. The truth needs to be told – for personal catharsis as well as political reckoning. “History cannot have its tongue cut out,” Tilda Swinton declares in The Seasons in Quincy, repeating John Berger’s words back to him. “It doesn’t really work, that kind of silence, because the curiosity and the need to know is still really there” … and because the past’s hold on the present cannot be broken until the violence is confronted, ended, and prevented from happening again. June’s suicide by immolation seems the only way she knows how to end her suffering. 

When Tom finally excavates the truth of June’s death, June becomes uncanny and abject. Banished from the comprehensible symbolic order, she is beyond the dialectic of good and evil, blameless victim and blameworthy perpetrator. June is both familiar and strange, the nurturing mother and the monstrous lunatic, and her horrifically violent act of abandonment drives her daughter Winnie, inconsolable in her suffering, to addiction and premature death. June’s victimhood does not diminish her culpability, which is why she is paradoxical and uncanny to me. Tom both conceals and reveals June’s uncanniness. His love for June transcends the horrors that have haunted their life together, her ongoing grief and torments are unspoken in the text except obliquely or as afterthoughts, and Tom’s will and sensibility aestheticize the story as a beautiful, albeit tragic, love story, not a horror story. It’s all about the emotional responses, cinematographic/visual cues, and non-diegetic musical choices. The story is well-rehearsed and –crafted so that we see only what Tom wants us to see. Tom chooses a narrative that prioritizes the good and the beautiful of their life together, which is commendable but also causes his undoing and leaves him stuck in limbo. 

There are so many references to Irish life and lore in this book of which I am hopelessly ignorant and which i still need to investigate. I was shocked and moved, however, to find a mirror when I was expecting a window. Ronnie McGillicuddy’s solo cello performance of “Kol Nidrei” is what permits Tom to finally confess to himself the truth of the series of disasters, sparked by June’s suicide, that culminates in his whole family’s demise. He lets go of the carefully curated, controlled narrative he’s been clutching in a death grip. “Kol Nidrei” effectuates the return of the repressed. History cannot have its tongue cut out. The truth will out somehow. We need to be able to look at ourselves and how we got here plainly before we can move on to Sheol. Like Job, Tom loses his entire family and still makes a choice to do good, be good, preserve good memories of his wife and children, and hold onto love and praise. There is much talk of what the “defining” feature of humanity is – whether we are homo faber, homo economicus, homo ludens, homo sapiens, etc. The text posits us as “confessing animals,” in the words of Foucault, and homo narrans, storytelling man – that the stories we tell ourselves and others are primary to our identity constructions and to our interpretations of our own lives. Tom must tell this story in order to be freed from it. Tom needs to confess, and the Catholic Church, a poisoned chalice, renders it impossible to confess to a priest. Jews, contrastingly, have no intermediaries; we apologize to the people we’ve wronged and confess our private sins to God alone. Kol Nidrei – “all vows,” the plaintive beseeching on Erev Yom Kippur, the eve of the Day of Atonement, is a private confession to our god cried and witnessed as a collective voice. I read that it was written for Jews who were forced to utter false conversions to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition (or earlier instances of forced conversion). It’s a stripping of artifice; we come vulnerable and emotionally naked, the unworthy sinners that we are, and we beg for God to cancel all the deceits we’ve told ourselves and others, freely and under duress. Tom is freeing himself from blissful deceit and leaving behind denial and the active occlusion of forgetting when he times his confession of his buried secret to “Kol Nidrei.”

So, now we have layers of storytelling – the sanitized/repressed, official or licit story and the buried/submerged, illicit story, the latter a confession that must surface. Is the confession made under mental duress, a distorted mirror and internalization of the confession extracted from the torturer? Is it the God of the Old Testament’s Book of Job who requires this confession and who tortures Tom to test his character and his faith? The Book of Job explains why Tom’s whole family has perished and why he has been subjected to the cruel vicissitudes of fate, but I have a problem metaphysicalizing the cruelty of human torturers by attributing their sadism to a capricious deity. 

The epigraph is interesting: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?” (The Book of Job). I read that some Christian translators of the Hebrew Bible translate the Hebrew word re’em as “unicorn,” while in Jewish texts, re’em is translated as a wild ox or antelope, or some other (perhaps extinct) large land animal. There are mythical creatures and monsters in the Hebrew Bible – behemoth and leviathan come to mind – but perhaps the unicorn wasn’t meant to be one of them; a natural animal has become a mythical one through a translation error. In Christian allegory, the unicorn symbolizes a virgin, the virginal mother of Christ, or the passion of the Christ. Maybe the unicorn symbolizes the violated child, the childhood abuse victim, the sacrifice to man’s venality, suffering at the hands of those entrusted with safeguarding the inviolability of her soul (it reminds me of the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin). When Tom hallucinates or remembers an incident with Mr. Tomelty (interesting name, don’t know what to make of it) and his wife, there is a unicorn in the corner of the room, staring at them, like the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. What does it signify? A sign for the reader that we’ve left reality, but perhaps something more.

The Yom Kippur allusions in the text link the unicorn to the scapegoat, the sacrificed animal onto whom collective sins were transferred to wash their sins white, which in Christianity becomes Jesus, the lamb of God. The epigraph about the unicorn has a different meaning in Job, though. When Job cries out to God in his desolation and laments that his cry goes unanswered, God replies to Job in the tempest, and his reply is basically, “Who the heck do you think you are? Did you make the heavens and earth? Would the creatures serve you?” God chastises man for his hubris and audacity – calling it self-deification – to question God’s justice, which manifests as gratuitous and undeserved suffering. A friend has helped me to understand that by this quote, Barry is condemning abusive priests, as they have made themselves into false idols.

Feel free to share any thoughts on the text. Sebastian Barry has given us this incredible gift, and I am so grateful to him.