My affection for Tom Kettle got lost in this post. I love his kindness and empathy, his Rabelaisian wit, his capacity to love deeply, his intelligence, and his humility. I loved this book.
I love Tom, in many ways I am him and he is me. The fog that is slowly overtaking him seems somehow familiar. In my opinion, as everyone that knows me knows, there is absolutely no good reason why this book did not win the Booker in 2023.
And I don’t think you lost him in your beautiful critique, to me he was integral to all that you said.
I'll have to look up the other Booker contenders for that year. There are so many I haven't read! This is one of my favorite books of all time, so without having read the others, I want to agree with you that it should have won! Ha.
It may be interpretively and rhetorically lazy for me to stamp June as "uncanny," but the reason I think of her as such is that I see her as becoming her own doppelganger, dark double, and revenant when she commits that final unspeakable act. There's nothing in the text up to that point to indicate those impulses inside her, and they're so irreconcilable to her other identity, that to me the incomprehensibility and illegibility of it made her doubled and uncanny. Although we know the anguish that causes her actions, as a reader i developed this sense of alienation from her caused by her fundamental twoness; though we thought we knew her, she becomes totally foreign. I was so angry with her when I got to that scene.
When the priest is killed, do you think Tom killed him? the scene is almost a Lynch-ian scene in how they get to the priest and he is killed. June does emerge from his coat..
I keep thinking about Tom and Tomelty, the names are quite alike, and I wonder if that means something, are they the same person?
There's so much in this text that I missed the first time around that it bears re-reading. I thought June flies out and stabs the priest with the kitchen knife, although it feels like an implausible murder weapon now that I type it. Maybe we aren't supposed to trust the impressionistic version of the narrative that Tom gives in his addled state. Tom and Tomelty are echoes of each other. And Tom imagines Tomelty's wife, who has died. And the woman he's supposed to be looking out for in the apartments has supposedly died decades before. It's all very mysterious. I think that in my desire to impose a rational narrative on it, I tied up loose ends that can't really be given order. I don't know what to make of the Tom/Tomelty doubling or foils. If they are the same person, what then?
Thanks Rebecca, I just thought the boy he was saving was himself, the tower very much his subconscious. I wasn't sure what to make of Tomelty, it was an odd place to live, the castle and the lean-on. For a while I toyed with the idea that Tom is Ireland, and the castle as a reflection of its grand history. Do people really live in lean-ons? So, Tomelty is Tom in 'Old Gods Time's, in a different part of Ireland's history . Tomelty is also an anglicised Gaelic name, and Tom a Christian sounding name (St. Thomas).
Temporality and intergenerational violence/trauma.
The tragedy of it is that he can't save the boy he was, or the girl June was. Your symbolic, multitemporal readings and how they impinge on Ireland's historical character are so rich and beautiful. They add another layer of metaphysics.
Maybe it was just another way for me to accept that this was a tragic, doomed romance where the boy can't save the girl from the clutches of hell. I've been thinking about when novels rise to the level of the mythic and archetypal and if it's reductive (myopically Western, epistemologically imperialist) for me to read universality or metaphysical truth in the mythos. I'm thinking about what you wrote about the converted castle as a metaphor for Ireland, perhaps both signalling the the inescapable imprint of the seemingly moribund old order of ruins and historical ghosts and the way that it gets repurposed into something new. But the devastation and ghosts need to be reckoned with. The modernization belies the ruins underneath. The thought is still inchoate, ha.
Thank you Rebecca for a thought provoking and enriching reflection.
I think we are all looking for coherence in our individual experiences of the past in order to make sense of the present and feel secure in ourselves. For some, like Tom Kettle, the past is so horrifying that it can't be faced in it's realness or entirety. The distortions are the minds way of protecting the self from the horror. Living alone amplifies this experience as the past can't be shared, held, or supported by another which to my mind is the only way toward healing - the presence of the resonant other.
That's so beautiful, Vanessa. I agree completely. We need the support of others to heal. Soul-bearing and intimacy are essential. I love how you identified this perfectly: the distortion of the mind is a way to protect oneself from horror. When the psyche is damaged, either we protect ourselves in loneliness through occlusion and distortion, or we respond and create something vulnerable and candid to share with others whom we choose to make our intimates -- lovers, friends, relatives, and affinity community.
PART 2 One of the ways I found myself making sense of Tom’s predicament was through existentialism and Hamlet, linked by the idea of acting ie commitment to action and role-playing. (Though of course, I would add the same caveats as you to my own hermaneutics…. ) Tom’s fear of being crushed by the eternal burden he must carry of his family’s buried truths, and shame that hasn’t dared to confront them, reminded me of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Like Hamlet, he asks why, if the world is so meaningless, we don’t just commit suicide, but concludes that if Sisyphus can push his rock to the top of the mountain for all eternity, in the lucid knowledge that it is futile, paradoxically, he can find meaning. He then goes on, like Shakespeare, to see a parallel with the actor condemned to play a role he didn’t choose on the stage of life, but committing to it. And thereby, as Hamlet concludes, creating a marvellous fiction, a paradoxical illusion of truth that the audience believes. So the tragic hero ‘acts’ in both senses, ironically to create meaning out of absurdity, by being fully conscious that it’s an illusion.
I had the constant sense that that’s what Tom tries to do; he sees life as an eternal trial - hence the comparisons of him to Job and his references to the ‘stations’ of memory/parenthood. The only way he has been able to avoid killing himself like his wife and daughter is to find his own sustaining illusion, which is to immortalise June. He knows she’s not really still alive, as he fears she’ll vanish if he looks away from her image, and the very fact that he elevates her to mythic levels (hair like the golden fleece, a Trickster, the Madonna, Miss Havisham and Estella in one) emphasises her unreality. I must admit, I was a touch frustrated at times that June didn’t feel as real or human as Tom, but that disappeared when I realised she is the illusion he has chosen to help him endure and stay alive. I’m not sure that entirely excuses the odd rare lapse in Barry’s style, like when she’s described in vague, sentimental terms, but no writer is perfect and the very greatest should never even try to be. (Barry also occasionally goes a simile too far…. ) As Hardy says of his heroine Tess: “It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
Still on the theme of acting to create the illusion of meaning, I was interested to see Barry’s use of stage imagery in relation to two minor key characters. The cellist, whose shooting of cormorants might possibly be a symptom of trauma following the sectioning of his wife (have I remembered correctly?), changes into a silk ‘costume’ for the Kol Nidrei and swaps destruction of life for the creation of music - art being his redemptive illusion. Likewise, Mr Tomelty (who’s more than once referenced using stage imagery), swaps his landlord’s clothes for those of his gardening alter ego, a role he plays which allows him to survive the loss of his wife through his symbolic regenerative garden.
At times in the novel, Barry implies we should see Tom in the mould of the old questing heroes of ancient myths and fairytales, men with the fate of their tribe and nation resting on their shoulders, men charged with the burden of ridding their land of a plague. Such men must undergo trials in the dark night of the forest, but eventually prevail so that their people can finally be cured, the curse lifted and order restored so healing can begin. There’s a fabulous passage where he makes this strong suggestion, and I took it as a comment on the complicity of everyone in Ireland in the sins of the ‘empire of the priesthood’ - including those like Tom, who have perpetuated it by their silence. Hamlet sees himself as an instrument of moral revenge, a ‘scourge and minister’ who will rid Denmark of the cancerous blight that’s befallen it in the shape of the new murderous, adulterous king. Like him, Tom realises he and June may have to take on the moral contagion of priests and become rats themselves in order to kill them with their own poison. But eventually, like the Hamlet of Act 5, he realises it’s impossible for humans to ever properly avenge injustice and not be destroyed by the attempt. I guess that must be why he only has a fantasy of him and June enacting it. Similarly, why Joe’s death has to be a murder that forces him to realise the superiority of self-healing forgiveness over embittering vengeance, when he’s confronted by the mirror image of a father ‘Cuchulainn’ like himself.
I think that’s why he eventually surrenders to the idea of larger forces at work in the universe - the gods, malevolent fates or just ‘life’s mysteries’ - and like Hamlet in Act 5, accepts what will be will be, and just stops puzzling over them. Which takes me back to Camus, who declared: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ with his meaningful illusion. That’s the idea I was left with by the end as Tom meditates on the beautous blessing of Mr Tomelty’s little paradise garden, and feels this is what humans were created for. I found myself thinking of Voltaire’s Candide, who eventually gives up metaphysical speculation about the world’s evils, and instead contents himself with ‘cultivating his garden’ - purposeful, productive activity within human limits. Maybe Mr Tomelty is also a little god of his own creation, a garden that is an illusion of paradise lost restored. I seem to remember June too had a literal small paradise garden, but of course there’s the larger symbolic one of stolen childhood innocence that she and Tom were cast out of. Mr Tomelty’s garden refuge helps Tom to heal somewhat as he realises that human life may be insignificant - except for others’ memories of us, but nature at least is enduring. It allows Tom finally to accept ‘summer’s justice’ is the best he can hope for, that evil probably will endure, but so too will beauty. Life in all its darkness and light will go on.
I know this is a reading that may seem to bring too much meaning and order to the chaos and horror of the story, but unexpected joy was the overwhelming feeling I had throughout this incredibly intense read. I looked forward to the precious hour or so I had each day to read the book, savoured every sentence, and felt glad to be alive. That feeling didn’t come from nowhere - Sebastian Barry’s story did that to me.
And, like you, I saw everything as having cosmic significance and mythical proportions. It's the paradox of free will and abiding sense of fatedness all at once, and it gives me that brain-tingling sensation that we exist on several planes / realms all at once, that there's so much more to our lives than vulgar materialism and happenstance. Maybe there is a world of metaphysically true archetypes and forms that plays out in daily life. Who are we to say? Maybe we're all enacting these dramas because they've been predestined for us, and by identifying the esoteric scripts that they map onto, we're unearthing the layers of beauty of them.
Much to think about here! I definitely agree that the novel seems to suggest Tom is living in multiple dimensions at once, especially of time, and that probably links in some way to the title concept and secrets and memories buried paradoxically in an eternal old God’s time that the characters could access if they had the courage to.
When you brought up Kettle's cellist neighbor shooting cormorants as a trauma response to separating from his wife, it jogged my memory of Kettle's recollection of his wartime activities. Was he in Malaya? Palestine? both? And "June's war" was Vietnam; she couldn't protest what had happened to her, so she sublimated her pain into empathy to protest the atrocities of that war. You connected it to the molds / moulds and social roles that Tom and June have had to cast on and off, like different skins, especially Tom -- soldier, husband, police detective, father. All these roles require truth and falsity / adherence to an illusion, even if it goes against one's particularities and instincts. I think that's what the scene of him slapping Winnie (or Joe?) for almost drowning another child was about. We all contain these personae and have to play our parts, whether they're natural or affected, until maybe the truth and the illusion become confused and blurred. And then Tom got swept away in this world of denial and illusions regarding June that he lost sight of her. To return to her, he had to confront the ghosts. You said so much more. Must re-read. I love that you related it to Hamlet, Camus' essay on Sisyphus and surrendering to the absurd, and so many other references. I'll return to what you wrote and respond again.
Interesting train of thought on the idea of role-playing and action that I brought up, and definitely agree about the sublimation - very much a phenomenon of trauma victims, especially women. It was Joe that Tom slapped for knocking a girl into the water, but this is ironically reversed later in a dream sequence when he imagines he’s seen Mrs McNulty’s daughter knocking a boy into the water - but it turns out this is the dead daughter, a victim of her father’s abuse. The two sequences are clearly connected, but I can’t work out exactly how. All I know is there seem to be a lot of ghost children, and buried bodies of girls, like the curious one that he describes almost like a fallen angel. All symbols of the evil that powerful men do to children, and Irish society’s complicity in keeping them buried in eternal silence (remember that chilling paragraph about policemen like Tom having to look away from domestic violence because ‘the lowliest of men were kings of women…It was a matter beyond the law….It was what everyone wanted.‘ - maybe a parallel to the ‘empire of priesthood‘). And oddly, I found myself thinking of bodies of ancient girl victims of violence buried in the Irish peat, like the one in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen’…
I’m also still puzzling over all the dead beautiful mothers in this novel - quite a few characters seem to have them….
After having read The Secret Scripture by Barry (not nearly as lyrical/ poetic in writing, but a good read and an interesting story nonetheless) and watching Philomena with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, I feel like I've developed more understanding of the context to inhabit the soul and sensibility of Old God's Time, the central theme of all of these texts being crimes against motherhood and the violence of stealing babies. Looking back on Old God's Time after my first reading (I anticipate there will be more to come; the prose is so rich and dense), I still find myself shattered by June's actions to the point of being intensely angry with her. She had the opportunity to enjoy healing through a reparative motherhood, and she destroyed it by repeating the kind of violence that was enacted upon her, upsetting the entire cosmic balance that held her family aloft. The tragedy continues.
Ah! I think I’m clearer now about what you meant about being angry with June. I love the humanness of your reaction - before OGT I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, and wanted to scream at her character’s passivity and failure to stand up for her rights - and mostly at the writer for robbing us of a more inspiring story - despite understanding full well the context of the times. (Ditto Marianne in Normal People - the abusive sex she submits to made me rage!). We *should* feel intensely engaged like that with well-written characters that feel real.
I also largely agree with you on the general issue of June - or any character or even real-life person - not taking the chance of embracing life through reparative healing, especially when everything seems to be going for them. Besides, June has the abiding love of Tom, and healing was the great theme underlying the Kol Nidrei motif in the latter part of the novel. However, I suppose Barry wants to emphasise the hard truth that some trauma is beyond healing, so deeply buried in ‘old God’s time’ like the unexploded bomb he refers to: undefused, it can go off unexpectedly at any time. Honestly, I’m no psychiatrist, so probably out of my depth here, but we know from countless real-life examples that people deal with their trauma in so many different ways, and cycles of trauma and abuse often do sadly seem to self-perpetuate… It’s also true that anger at others can be a sublimated form of distress at our own inability to control events, or their actions eg I once fell from a great height at home, broke three of my limbs and my mother’s first action was to beat me senseless again….! Sorry, if all that just sounds like a series of commonplaces.
But anyway, the main reason I don’t feel as angry as you about her action is that June never really felt like a fully rounded, real human character to me, because much of the time she’s an illusion in head that might vanish, and Tom mythologises her so much. I don’t know if I’m fully understanding your use of ‘uncanny’, but I see her as closer to a representative figure like the other ghosts of the novel, than to full characterisation like Tom.
Ah, that makes sense. You couldn't be angry with her because she was unreal to you. Perhaps she was purely a metaphor/ symbol. I think that one of my shortcomings as a reader is that I want certain narratives to be redemptive. I'm cheerleading for redemption; intellectually I understand that not all stories have happy or romantic endings (a romantic ending not necessarily being a happy one, as when the slave throws himself off the cliff / puts himself to the sword rather than remain fettered), but my heart can't catch up. I don't understand how a character like June can be a loving wife and mother and also be someone who self- immolates in a blaze of glory. This character, whom I thoroughly suspended disbelief to create as a fully realized human being, made a series of choices, most significant among them being motherhood, which brings a reliable release of oxytocin, constant worries, and transfiguration into nurturer. I would say "as a mother, I can't understand," but that sounds tired and cliched... but! -- As a mother I can't understand! (There, I said it.)
You're right. Those two scenes do seem to be mirroring each other. Why? I'll have to think more about what it all signifies. My first reaction to the "dead mothers" motif -- "all those dead mothers, hovering above us" -- related to the violence that comes from eliding women by making men irreproachable authorities. What's the word they use for the pope? Infallible? Maybe it's saying that a society that makes male authority infallible and unaccountable produces dead mothers, killing the divine mother and the divine feminine. That story with the actress whose husband abused the child was horrific. Don't know what to make of it. It feels reductive and overdetermined for me to try to make the novel into an ordered symbolic universe where everything has isomorphic signification with an overarching thesis. I don't know.
The children, especially the ghost children, are at risk of pushing each other down into the waters. I came across something explication that Japanese Shinto mythology places one of the portals to the underworld in the ocean. And then, in this Shinto mythological story, there's a man who tries to retrieve his beloved from the underworld, like Orpheus and Eurydice. https://www.worldhistory.org/Yomi/
More interesting angles to ponder on! Definitely agree with this: ‘ It feels reductive and overdetermined for me to try to make the novel into an ordered symbolic universe where everything has isomorphic signification with an overarching thesis.’ The very reason I enjoyed the novel was Barry’s sense of the mystery and unknowability of things. In interviews I’ve now read/heard from him, I wasn’t surprised that he described his creative process as a very organic, instinctive one, rather than highly planned or schematic. And as a reader, I’m happy to live with uncertainty and for some elements to remain complex and undecipherable. Maybe they’ll reveal themselves in re-readings when I’ll be reading as a different person, maybe not. Just as with a running stream, we never step into the same book twice….
PART 1 I can honestly say, without exaggeration, that though I went in with my usual low expectations of contemporary fiction, this turned out to be by far the best novel I’ve read in the last twenty years, and it may just have restored my faith in today’s novelists. It was my first ever Sebastian Barry and now I’m afraid to read another in case it fails to match up…. A simply magnificent novel of extraordinary amplitude, weaving together questions of human relations, psychology, identity, society, culture, politics, philosophy and metaphysics into one richly textured fabric called Tom Kettle (household staple and Irish poet, journalist and politician, I’ve discovered). I heard Barry in a Waterstones podcast describe him as ‘the champion of my soul’, and think his decision to merge his and Tom’s voices through a third person interior monologue narrative is a stroke of genius. It makes the novel both profoundly moving and intellectually stimulating. I wept many times for Tom and his family, and at the sheer beauty of Barry’s language, with its subtle echoes of Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’ and the eternal rowing of boats against the tide in The Great Gatsby.
Yes, I had the odd moment of frustration with the fluid, unstable narrative and the blurring of illusion and reality. But ultimately I never really felt Tom was actually an unreliable narrator, and wasn’t surprised to read afterwards that neither does Barry. He’s such a rounded, richly realised character - maybe you could call his double-consciousness Sebastian Kettle - that paradoxically, I was convinced of the truth of his dream world. Tom is so loving and lovable, so unmistakably human that he grounds everything, making the harrowingly unbelievable believable. The very fact that he persists in telling his tale, knowing no-one hears except himself (and the reader), feels like an act of faith and survival that’s ultimately life-affirming. ‘Sebastian Kettle’ held the whole novel together in a way that actually reminded me of an ironising Victorian novelist with a big humanist heart - because of his references to the gods and fate, and his darkly poetic style, maybe Thomas Hardy? I felt so at home in Barry’s moral, but not moralising universe that I didn’t want to leave it.
What fascinates me most is the way Barry moves so easily from the earthy to the transcendent, and from the domestic to the divine - and back again, in a vertical line. I loved feeling transported by his many sublime passages of poetry describing soaring falcons, arrows, gold and silver showers of light, oceans, sun and stars, pitch-black nights of existential despair - even cosmic annihilation, whilst being earthed by the humble reality of Tom’s everyday world of comical Indian head-nods, candle-wicks, plant pots, tea leaves, ham sandwiches, sausages and most Irishly of all, potatoes. I was especially impressed and moved to tears by the darkness and light imagery - the way he links the sun itself being quenched by the oceans to the priests’ oceans of lust putting out children’s souls like candle-wicks, to Tom imagining his own final reverse big-bang extinction in the tiny disappearing dot of light in his TV...
In fact, I think Barry celebrates what he sees as the divine in humans. Chiefly, Tom’s meditations - his deep sense of gratitude for everything in creation, of feeling blessed, his god-like conferring of feelings and grace to inanimate objects, even his figure-of-eight Indian head-nod (an infinity symbol) - and most of all, his sense of himself as a protective Cuchulainn, the demi-god figure and son of god of light in Irish mythology. One of my favourite scenes is when Barry expands this idea of human divinity outwards from the cellist, a little ‘god of music’, whose playing creates an invisible sense of ‘holy communion’ between all the neighbours who hear him whilst they dine on the simplest food.
But he moves horizontally too, creating complex, ironic patterns and parallels of language and imagery that are endlessly stimulating. There are intriguing references to ham: Father Matthews the ham-faced butcher of children, and the ironic reversal of his power through the conceit of Tom and June as a human ham-sandwich climbing the mountain to avenge themselves on him. And the humble breadknife, which June bought in the first week of their marriage and used to slice every loaf of bread they ever ate, but the once-tiny baby girl later supposedly uses to kill her powerful patriarchal priestly abuser. It’s a sacred, innocent ‘murder’ weapon that’s never disposed of but stays in Tom’s kitchen - as if to imply that an imaginative act of revenge was enough - and innocent in the hands of Winnie, who puzzlingly uses it to cut ever-smaller sandwiches at her mother’s funeral. But the most memorable for me was the foreshadowing of June’s suicide in the initial images of the burning intensity of their first summer of love, to the ‘fire of freedom’ that Tom experiences in a brief moment of liberation from his earthly burden - ironically just before the shock revelation that June douses herself with kerosene and sets herself alight (maybe her own ‘fire of freedom’?).
I adore the close readings that you do, Shabanah. Your attentiveness to the language is magnificent. You brought to life and elucidated many more symbols than I had in reading, and I'm so grateful to you for explicating them, especially Cuchulainn. I love your characterization of Tom Kettle's world as one filled with human divinity and demi-gods. Are the priests, alternately, demi-demons/ demi-devils? After reading your sumptuous review, it's clear that I need to re-read this book to capture more of the evocative language. I have been thinking about that island that Tom views from his balcony as the underworld or Sheol, and his swimming towards it as his liberation from this mortal coil. You reflected so much of that sublime poetry in your reflection. It's just beautiful. On to read the next one.
Thanks Rebecca, what you say about the priests would make sense but thankfully he doesn’t dignify them with anything that would give them even a dark anti-divine grandeur, but seems to opt instead for images of subhuman predatory beasts. I struggled to understand fully what was happening in that final section but agree it felt like he was heading towards a liberatory suicide in the turbid waters, or what the full significance of the whirlpool effect was. Clearly, I need to re-read all the sea/ocean images, but your idea of an underworld is a very appealing one.
I’ve only just started the novel so apologies for not responding to anything written here - I’m not being rude, just trying hard not to look at the moment so I can avoid spoilers. However, I’m adding an inital response here to the first three chapters while they’re fresh in my mind to keep the discussion going.
Well, at this point I’m SO impressed! It feels like my kind of novel: brilliantly poetic and profoundly humanist writing, centred on an absorbing study of a complex, tormented and morally generous character (Tom remembers the ‘glory of his wicker chair’ and even cares about his night-time toilet trips disturbing inanimate objects in his home and ‘gives them the grace of human feelings’ for being his only companions!). I love how the interior monologue / stream-of-consciousness draws us deep into his psyche and the mental prison he’s trapped in, and I noted many images of prison (including him as a ‘double Jonah’), or temporary release from it, suggesting shame and guilt.
Barry takes what in the hands of a lesser writer would just be a hoary old trope, the retired detective who’s reluctant to answer one last compelling call of duty but eventually does, and takes it to extraordinary, unexpected places. For example, the startling juxtapositions and leaps in the passage in Chapter 2 when the two policemen visit, from ‘O’Casey confessing to an ulcer’ to ‘the chain solemnly flushed’. He takes us from the storm inside the toilet, to the storm outside battering the lean-to, to soldiers in the trenches, to the outrageous climactic image of the explosive volcano that brings all three together and almost makes Tom weep. Well, all that just made me gasp. Bold, original writing that’s simultaneously warmly humane, absurdly funny and intensely life-affirming.
One of the things I look for in truly great writing is a sense of the mystery or unknowability of life, and we certainly get that from the start. All of nature seems animated in these chapters and the sea in particular feels like a powerful, darkly protean force that seems to play a role in pulling Tom back to his calling: ‘Policing always had its salt of danger, like the sea itself.’ I’m also really enjoying Tom’s sense of wonder at all kinds of things in the world - however tiny or big - despite all his despair. So I like the unabashed ease with which Barry infuses his prose with spiritual language like ‘blessed’, ‘grace’, ‘soul’ - even biblical images like ‘threshing the bitter grains of life’ and faintly archaic/elevated language to capture Tom’s almost Romantic affinity with nature: ‘This present sunlight was only a distant cousin of the summer’s, but it was a comfort, it was a herald, it was a joy’.
I’m also finding it very stimulating the way Barry expands that to metaphysical questions of our ultimate human (in?)significance, leaping from micro to macro worlds eg heart-stoppingly, here: ‘‘there was a bracket where the ceiling met the wall, what it had been for he didn’t have an idea. Onions maybe, or some sort of vanished kitchen machine. Or the pin that held the universe in its place?’. Or through references to the gods, and here, to neutrinos (quantum physics?) and the cosmos: ‘You came on everything good by chance. He liked it for its modesty among the bigger efforts. Like a human soul should be in the world, among elephants, galaxies.’ Love the touch of humour in the middle there.
Another thing I’m enjoying is the tiny cast of characters and simple, slowly unfurling plot as I really can’t cope with too much of either of those. I’m one of those people that wish every novel came with a playscript-type character list so I don’t have to waste any mental energy working out who’s who or what’s what, which for me is the least interesting element in a novel. But what I do love is a great stylist - even better, a poetic novelist. I don’t mind living so intensely in Tom’s head in these early chapters, if it means Barry describing minor characters like this: ‘She [Winnie] flamed through the first year, her mother died, she emptied out somehow, she pushed on emptily, she graduated, dressed in her finery, in her grief.’ What beautiful poetic compression, and to end on such a poignant image, merging graduation and mourning clothes….
Excuse my enthusiastic babbling but this is only my first Barry, so I’m very late to the party and over-excited. So many memorably poetic images and I’ve only read three chapters so far!
I’ll return in a couple of weeks or so with my thoughts on the whole novel and read all the comments too, but for now, will just end on a few more that stopped me in my tracks for their epigrammatic power:
‘He knew there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife.’ - perfectly exemplified, I think, by the toilet scene/ suicide attempt.
‘The best things in Ireland were the work of unknown hands. And oftentimes the worst crimes.’ - a clever, dark turn in what must be a sinister reference to priests’ abusive hands.
‘No one minds life as long as they are not trying to leave it. Nor death, as long as they are not dying.’ There speaks a true humanist: we can endure the reality of both life and death.
Shabanah, this is such a gorgeous and rich meditation on the text and its poetry. I prefer your comment to my post, actually. Beautifully done. You need to post these thoughts elsewhere. At least, I hope you do. What an invitation to linger on the aesthetic and metaphysical richness contained in the text. You captured its spirit exquisitely. I found myself sighing in admiration of the beauty of the prose all over again and nodding along with your sentiments. I too love the Romanticism of Tom 's nature observations mirroring his immediate inner and outer/social worlds, and I'm so glad that's one of the textual themes you centered/ centred. When I got to the scene where Tom narrates O'Casey's gastrointestinal distress, I shook the bed with laughter, a response which I'm sure my sleeping husband did not appreciate. I love the juxtaposition of Tom's keen intelligence and Romantic spirit, which connects his circumstances to sweeping, cosmic mysteries in nature and in the great beyond, to his Rabelaisian bodily preoccupations, which focus on the ageing body and its functions not with a sense of indignity or fear, but with humor, curiosity, and grace/ aplomb.
As I’ve reread this discussion for probably the fifth or sixth time (and also discovered a few “new” replies because I really don’t yet understand how to use Substack) I’m developing a thought about Barry’s brilliance. His true ability as a writer just might be the fact that he tells a story in a way that literary intellectual individuals like you two and literary incompetents like me can all fall deeply in love with his work. The more I read you two, the more depth you bring to the story that I love so much, the more amazed I am, the more I want to read OGT again and again and again.
The realization of how much I missed in this wonderful beyond description book saddens me. I think more Tom Sebastian can help.
I don't consider you a literary incompetent, whatever that is, but I do think this book requires re-readings. I missed a lot on the first reading, too. I'm trying to write something on Crooked Plow and have just started The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I'm already in love with the writing and narrative voice, and that hasn't happened since OGT! What are you reading?
Lost Children Archive (got an extension from the library) and Love and Summer, William Trevor one daytime the other at night. Just finished Olive Kitteridge. I really liked Crooked Plough and hope it makes the short list, it’s the best of what I’ve read. I had trouble with Seven Moons, probably had more to do with head space than the book. I’ve stopped reading BI long list, after five or six of them , waiting to see what happens on Tuesday.
Seems awfully quiet on BPBC page the last couple of days, maybe everybody is busy reading.
I liked OK, but didn’t love it. I am really enjoying Lost Children Archive, but sense anger on my part rising once I get deeper in (assuming much more on the horror that is our southern border.)
Really like Love and Summer so far, I like the story and the writing style.
I think it's a complicated book, there is just so much to unpack. And we all bounce ideas off each other, I really enjoy both your thoughts and posts, so thank you for sharing them. I also don't think you're literary incompetent. Just last night, I was thinking whether Tom actually killed the priest, because 'June emerged from his coat' in a way that reminded me of body horror. I need to reread that scene again.
Rebecca, I have finally read your stunning review of the novel and love your reading of it through the lens of Orpheus and Eurydice (one of my favourite Greek myths that seems to have inspired so much great art) and Death & The Maiden. I’ve been planning to read that for years having missed all opportunities to see it on stage, but did finally see and enjoy the film at least last year. I also very much agree with what you say about Tom’s storytelling ‘truth’ and non-diegetic music choices etc - lovely way of interpreting it - I sometimes find myself creating edited, filmic versions of my own life! Your choice of ‘aestheticises’ for what Tom does to June’s memory is so well-judged - ‘romanticise’ would go too far and miss the point.
Very belatedly, I’ve finally written up my reaction from notes I made as I was reading, and pasted it below, just adding a few points now in response to one or two of your misgivings/questions about the novel. It was meant to be just a couple of paragraphs, but I found it impossible with a novel that like you say, contains ‘multitudes’. Please excuse typos/incoherence/plot errors (not my forte!)…..
What an amazing, helpful and well written post. I loved this book but definitely needed help understanding the many threads and devices used the tell the story. Thanks for your excellent work here. Best review of any I read
My affection for Tom Kettle got lost in this post. I love his kindness and empathy, his Rabelaisian wit, his capacity to love deeply, his intelligence, and his humility. I loved this book.
I love Tom, in many ways I am him and he is me. The fog that is slowly overtaking him seems somehow familiar. In my opinion, as everyone that knows me knows, there is absolutely no good reason why this book did not win the Booker in 2023.
And I don’t think you lost him in your beautiful critique, to me he was integral to all that you said.
I'll have to look up the other Booker contenders for that year. There are so many I haven't read! This is one of my favorite books of all time, so without having read the others, I want to agree with you that it should have won! Ha.
It may be interpretively and rhetorically lazy for me to stamp June as "uncanny," but the reason I think of her as such is that I see her as becoming her own doppelganger, dark double, and revenant when she commits that final unspeakable act. There's nothing in the text up to that point to indicate those impulses inside her, and they're so irreconcilable to her other identity, that to me the incomprehensibility and illegibility of it made her doubled and uncanny. Although we know the anguish that causes her actions, as a reader i developed this sense of alienation from her caused by her fundamental twoness; though we thought we knew her, she becomes totally foreign. I was so angry with her when I got to that scene.
When the priest is killed, do you think Tom killed him? the scene is almost a Lynch-ian scene in how they get to the priest and he is killed. June does emerge from his coat..
I keep thinking about Tom and Tomelty, the names are quite alike, and I wonder if that means something, are they the same person?
There's so much in this text that I missed the first time around that it bears re-reading. I thought June flies out and stabs the priest with the kitchen knife, although it feels like an implausible murder weapon now that I type it. Maybe we aren't supposed to trust the impressionistic version of the narrative that Tom gives in his addled state. Tom and Tomelty are echoes of each other. And Tom imagines Tomelty's wife, who has died. And the woman he's supposed to be looking out for in the apartments has supposedly died decades before. It's all very mysterious. I think that in my desire to impose a rational narrative on it, I tied up loose ends that can't really be given order. I don't know what to make of the Tom/Tomelty doubling or foils. If they are the same person, what then?
Thanks Rebecca, I just thought the boy he was saving was himself, the tower very much his subconscious. I wasn't sure what to make of Tomelty, it was an odd place to live, the castle and the lean-on. For a while I toyed with the idea that Tom is Ireland, and the castle as a reflection of its grand history. Do people really live in lean-ons? So, Tomelty is Tom in 'Old Gods Time's, in a different part of Ireland's history . Tomelty is also an anglicised Gaelic name, and Tom a Christian sounding name (St. Thomas).
Temporality and intergenerational violence/trauma.
The tragedy of it is that he can't save the boy he was, or the girl June was. Your symbolic, multitemporal readings and how they impinge on Ireland's historical character are so rich and beautiful. They add another layer of metaphysics.
The orpheus and eurydice connection sparked the thought process, thank you for recommending the book :-)
Maybe it was just another way for me to accept that this was a tragic, doomed romance where the boy can't save the girl from the clutches of hell. I've been thinking about when novels rise to the level of the mythic and archetypal and if it's reductive (myopically Western, epistemologically imperialist) for me to read universality or metaphysical truth in the mythos. I'm thinking about what you wrote about the converted castle as a metaphor for Ireland, perhaps both signalling the the inescapable imprint of the seemingly moribund old order of ruins and historical ghosts and the way that it gets repurposed into something new. But the devastation and ghosts need to be reckoned with. The modernization belies the ruins underneath. The thought is still inchoate, ha.
I LOVE that. Brilliant layers of meaning you've deciphered. Thank you.
Thank you for your engaging post, I enjoy bouncing ideas with you :-)
Unconscious, not subconscious*
Thank you Rebecca for a thought provoking and enriching reflection.
I think we are all looking for coherence in our individual experiences of the past in order to make sense of the present and feel secure in ourselves. For some, like Tom Kettle, the past is so horrifying that it can't be faced in it's realness or entirety. The distortions are the minds way of protecting the self from the horror. Living alone amplifies this experience as the past can't be shared, held, or supported by another which to my mind is the only way toward healing - the presence of the resonant other.
That's so beautiful, Vanessa. I agree completely. We need the support of others to heal. Soul-bearing and intimacy are essential. I love how you identified this perfectly: the distortion of the mind is a way to protect oneself from horror. When the psyche is damaged, either we protect ourselves in loneliness through occlusion and distortion, or we respond and create something vulnerable and candid to share with others whom we choose to make our intimates -- lovers, friends, relatives, and affinity community.
PART 2 One of the ways I found myself making sense of Tom’s predicament was through existentialism and Hamlet, linked by the idea of acting ie commitment to action and role-playing. (Though of course, I would add the same caveats as you to my own hermaneutics…. ) Tom’s fear of being crushed by the eternal burden he must carry of his family’s buried truths, and shame that hasn’t dared to confront them, reminded me of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Like Hamlet, he asks why, if the world is so meaningless, we don’t just commit suicide, but concludes that if Sisyphus can push his rock to the top of the mountain for all eternity, in the lucid knowledge that it is futile, paradoxically, he can find meaning. He then goes on, like Shakespeare, to see a parallel with the actor condemned to play a role he didn’t choose on the stage of life, but committing to it. And thereby, as Hamlet concludes, creating a marvellous fiction, a paradoxical illusion of truth that the audience believes. So the tragic hero ‘acts’ in both senses, ironically to create meaning out of absurdity, by being fully conscious that it’s an illusion.
I had the constant sense that that’s what Tom tries to do; he sees life as an eternal trial - hence the comparisons of him to Job and his references to the ‘stations’ of memory/parenthood. The only way he has been able to avoid killing himself like his wife and daughter is to find his own sustaining illusion, which is to immortalise June. He knows she’s not really still alive, as he fears she’ll vanish if he looks away from her image, and the very fact that he elevates her to mythic levels (hair like the golden fleece, a Trickster, the Madonna, Miss Havisham and Estella in one) emphasises her unreality. I must admit, I was a touch frustrated at times that June didn’t feel as real or human as Tom, but that disappeared when I realised she is the illusion he has chosen to help him endure and stay alive. I’m not sure that entirely excuses the odd rare lapse in Barry’s style, like when she’s described in vague, sentimental terms, but no writer is perfect and the very greatest should never even try to be. (Barry also occasionally goes a simile too far…. ) As Hardy says of his heroine Tess: “It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
Still on the theme of acting to create the illusion of meaning, I was interested to see Barry’s use of stage imagery in relation to two minor key characters. The cellist, whose shooting of cormorants might possibly be a symptom of trauma following the sectioning of his wife (have I remembered correctly?), changes into a silk ‘costume’ for the Kol Nidrei and swaps destruction of life for the creation of music - art being his redemptive illusion. Likewise, Mr Tomelty (who’s more than once referenced using stage imagery), swaps his landlord’s clothes for those of his gardening alter ego, a role he plays which allows him to survive the loss of his wife through his symbolic regenerative garden.
At times in the novel, Barry implies we should see Tom in the mould of the old questing heroes of ancient myths and fairytales, men with the fate of their tribe and nation resting on their shoulders, men charged with the burden of ridding their land of a plague. Such men must undergo trials in the dark night of the forest, but eventually prevail so that their people can finally be cured, the curse lifted and order restored so healing can begin. There’s a fabulous passage where he makes this strong suggestion, and I took it as a comment on the complicity of everyone in Ireland in the sins of the ‘empire of the priesthood’ - including those like Tom, who have perpetuated it by their silence. Hamlet sees himself as an instrument of moral revenge, a ‘scourge and minister’ who will rid Denmark of the cancerous blight that’s befallen it in the shape of the new murderous, adulterous king. Like him, Tom realises he and June may have to take on the moral contagion of priests and become rats themselves in order to kill them with their own poison. But eventually, like the Hamlet of Act 5, he realises it’s impossible for humans to ever properly avenge injustice and not be destroyed by the attempt. I guess that must be why he only has a fantasy of him and June enacting it. Similarly, why Joe’s death has to be a murder that forces him to realise the superiority of self-healing forgiveness over embittering vengeance, when he’s confronted by the mirror image of a father ‘Cuchulainn’ like himself.
I think that’s why he eventually surrenders to the idea of larger forces at work in the universe - the gods, malevolent fates or just ‘life’s mysteries’ - and like Hamlet in Act 5, accepts what will be will be, and just stops puzzling over them. Which takes me back to Camus, who declared: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ with his meaningful illusion. That’s the idea I was left with by the end as Tom meditates on the beautous blessing of Mr Tomelty’s little paradise garden, and feels this is what humans were created for. I found myself thinking of Voltaire’s Candide, who eventually gives up metaphysical speculation about the world’s evils, and instead contents himself with ‘cultivating his garden’ - purposeful, productive activity within human limits. Maybe Mr Tomelty is also a little god of his own creation, a garden that is an illusion of paradise lost restored. I seem to remember June too had a literal small paradise garden, but of course there’s the larger symbolic one of stolen childhood innocence that she and Tom were cast out of. Mr Tomelty’s garden refuge helps Tom to heal somewhat as he realises that human life may be insignificant - except for others’ memories of us, but nature at least is enduring. It allows Tom finally to accept ‘summer’s justice’ is the best he can hope for, that evil probably will endure, but so too will beauty. Life in all its darkness and light will go on.
I know this is a reading that may seem to bring too much meaning and order to the chaos and horror of the story, but unexpected joy was the overwhelming feeling I had throughout this incredibly intense read. I looked forward to the precious hour or so I had each day to read the book, savoured every sentence, and felt glad to be alive. That feeling didn’t come from nowhere - Sebastian Barry’s story did that to me.
And, like you, I saw everything as having cosmic significance and mythical proportions. It's the paradox of free will and abiding sense of fatedness all at once, and it gives me that brain-tingling sensation that we exist on several planes / realms all at once, that there's so much more to our lives than vulgar materialism and happenstance. Maybe there is a world of metaphysically true archetypes and forms that plays out in daily life. Who are we to say? Maybe we're all enacting these dramas because they've been predestined for us, and by identifying the esoteric scripts that they map onto, we're unearthing the layers of beauty of them.
Much to think about here! I definitely agree that the novel seems to suggest Tom is living in multiple dimensions at once, especially of time, and that probably links in some way to the title concept and secrets and memories buried paradoxically in an eternal old God’s time that the characters could access if they had the courage to.
When you brought up Kettle's cellist neighbor shooting cormorants as a trauma response to separating from his wife, it jogged my memory of Kettle's recollection of his wartime activities. Was he in Malaya? Palestine? both? And "June's war" was Vietnam; she couldn't protest what had happened to her, so she sublimated her pain into empathy to protest the atrocities of that war. You connected it to the molds / moulds and social roles that Tom and June have had to cast on and off, like different skins, especially Tom -- soldier, husband, police detective, father. All these roles require truth and falsity / adherence to an illusion, even if it goes against one's particularities and instincts. I think that's what the scene of him slapping Winnie (or Joe?) for almost drowning another child was about. We all contain these personae and have to play our parts, whether they're natural or affected, until maybe the truth and the illusion become confused and blurred. And then Tom got swept away in this world of denial and illusions regarding June that he lost sight of her. To return to her, he had to confront the ghosts. You said so much more. Must re-read. I love that you related it to Hamlet, Camus' essay on Sisyphus and surrendering to the absurd, and so many other references. I'll return to what you wrote and respond again.
Interesting train of thought on the idea of role-playing and action that I brought up, and definitely agree about the sublimation - very much a phenomenon of trauma victims, especially women. It was Joe that Tom slapped for knocking a girl into the water, but this is ironically reversed later in a dream sequence when he imagines he’s seen Mrs McNulty’s daughter knocking a boy into the water - but it turns out this is the dead daughter, a victim of her father’s abuse. The two sequences are clearly connected, but I can’t work out exactly how. All I know is there seem to be a lot of ghost children, and buried bodies of girls, like the curious one that he describes almost like a fallen angel. All symbols of the evil that powerful men do to children, and Irish society’s complicity in keeping them buried in eternal silence (remember that chilling paragraph about policemen like Tom having to look away from domestic violence because ‘the lowliest of men were kings of women…It was a matter beyond the law….It was what everyone wanted.‘ - maybe a parallel to the ‘empire of priesthood‘). And oddly, I found myself thinking of bodies of ancient girl victims of violence buried in the Irish peat, like the one in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen’…
I’m also still puzzling over all the dead beautiful mothers in this novel - quite a few characters seem to have them….
After having read The Secret Scripture by Barry (not nearly as lyrical/ poetic in writing, but a good read and an interesting story nonetheless) and watching Philomena with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, I feel like I've developed more understanding of the context to inhabit the soul and sensibility of Old God's Time, the central theme of all of these texts being crimes against motherhood and the violence of stealing babies. Looking back on Old God's Time after my first reading (I anticipate there will be more to come; the prose is so rich and dense), I still find myself shattered by June's actions to the point of being intensely angry with her. She had the opportunity to enjoy healing through a reparative motherhood, and she destroyed it by repeating the kind of violence that was enacted upon her, upsetting the entire cosmic balance that held her family aloft. The tragedy continues.
Ah! I think I’m clearer now about what you meant about being angry with June. I love the humanness of your reaction - before OGT I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, and wanted to scream at her character’s passivity and failure to stand up for her rights - and mostly at the writer for robbing us of a more inspiring story - despite understanding full well the context of the times. (Ditto Marianne in Normal People - the abusive sex she submits to made me rage!). We *should* feel intensely engaged like that with well-written characters that feel real.
I also largely agree with you on the general issue of June - or any character or even real-life person - not taking the chance of embracing life through reparative healing, especially when everything seems to be going for them. Besides, June has the abiding love of Tom, and healing was the great theme underlying the Kol Nidrei motif in the latter part of the novel. However, I suppose Barry wants to emphasise the hard truth that some trauma is beyond healing, so deeply buried in ‘old God’s time’ like the unexploded bomb he refers to: undefused, it can go off unexpectedly at any time. Honestly, I’m no psychiatrist, so probably out of my depth here, but we know from countless real-life examples that people deal with their trauma in so many different ways, and cycles of trauma and abuse often do sadly seem to self-perpetuate… It’s also true that anger at others can be a sublimated form of distress at our own inability to control events, or their actions eg I once fell from a great height at home, broke three of my limbs and my mother’s first action was to beat me senseless again….! Sorry, if all that just sounds like a series of commonplaces.
But anyway, the main reason I don’t feel as angry as you about her action is that June never really felt like a fully rounded, real human character to me, because much of the time she’s an illusion in head that might vanish, and Tom mythologises her so much. I don’t know if I’m fully understanding your use of ‘uncanny’, but I see her as closer to a representative figure like the other ghosts of the novel, than to full characterisation like Tom.
Ah, that makes sense. You couldn't be angry with her because she was unreal to you. Perhaps she was purely a metaphor/ symbol. I think that one of my shortcomings as a reader is that I want certain narratives to be redemptive. I'm cheerleading for redemption; intellectually I understand that not all stories have happy or romantic endings (a romantic ending not necessarily being a happy one, as when the slave throws himself off the cliff / puts himself to the sword rather than remain fettered), but my heart can't catch up. I don't understand how a character like June can be a loving wife and mother and also be someone who self- immolates in a blaze of glory. This character, whom I thoroughly suspended disbelief to create as a fully realized human being, made a series of choices, most significant among them being motherhood, which brings a reliable release of oxytocin, constant worries, and transfiguration into nurturer. I would say "as a mother, I can't understand," but that sounds tired and cliched... but! -- As a mother I can't understand! (There, I said it.)
You're right. Those two scenes do seem to be mirroring each other. Why? I'll have to think more about what it all signifies. My first reaction to the "dead mothers" motif -- "all those dead mothers, hovering above us" -- related to the violence that comes from eliding women by making men irreproachable authorities. What's the word they use for the pope? Infallible? Maybe it's saying that a society that makes male authority infallible and unaccountable produces dead mothers, killing the divine mother and the divine feminine. That story with the actress whose husband abused the child was horrific. Don't know what to make of it. It feels reductive and overdetermined for me to try to make the novel into an ordered symbolic universe where everything has isomorphic signification with an overarching thesis. I don't know.
The children, especially the ghost children, are at risk of pushing each other down into the waters. I came across something explication that Japanese Shinto mythology places one of the portals to the underworld in the ocean. And then, in this Shinto mythological story, there's a man who tries to retrieve his beloved from the underworld, like Orpheus and Eurydice. https://www.worldhistory.org/Yomi/
More interesting angles to ponder on! Definitely agree with this: ‘ It feels reductive and overdetermined for me to try to make the novel into an ordered symbolic universe where everything has isomorphic signification with an overarching thesis.’ The very reason I enjoyed the novel was Barry’s sense of the mystery and unknowability of things. In interviews I’ve now read/heard from him, I wasn’t surprised that he described his creative process as a very organic, instinctive one, rather than highly planned or schematic. And as a reader, I’m happy to live with uncertainty and for some elements to remain complex and undecipherable. Maybe they’ll reveal themselves in re-readings when I’ll be reading as a different person, maybe not. Just as with a running stream, we never step into the same book twice….
PART 1 I can honestly say, without exaggeration, that though I went in with my usual low expectations of contemporary fiction, this turned out to be by far the best novel I’ve read in the last twenty years, and it may just have restored my faith in today’s novelists. It was my first ever Sebastian Barry and now I’m afraid to read another in case it fails to match up…. A simply magnificent novel of extraordinary amplitude, weaving together questions of human relations, psychology, identity, society, culture, politics, philosophy and metaphysics into one richly textured fabric called Tom Kettle (household staple and Irish poet, journalist and politician, I’ve discovered). I heard Barry in a Waterstones podcast describe him as ‘the champion of my soul’, and think his decision to merge his and Tom’s voices through a third person interior monologue narrative is a stroke of genius. It makes the novel both profoundly moving and intellectually stimulating. I wept many times for Tom and his family, and at the sheer beauty of Barry’s language, with its subtle echoes of Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’ and the eternal rowing of boats against the tide in The Great Gatsby.
Yes, I had the odd moment of frustration with the fluid, unstable narrative and the blurring of illusion and reality. But ultimately I never really felt Tom was actually an unreliable narrator, and wasn’t surprised to read afterwards that neither does Barry. He’s such a rounded, richly realised character - maybe you could call his double-consciousness Sebastian Kettle - that paradoxically, I was convinced of the truth of his dream world. Tom is so loving and lovable, so unmistakably human that he grounds everything, making the harrowingly unbelievable believable. The very fact that he persists in telling his tale, knowing no-one hears except himself (and the reader), feels like an act of faith and survival that’s ultimately life-affirming. ‘Sebastian Kettle’ held the whole novel together in a way that actually reminded me of an ironising Victorian novelist with a big humanist heart - because of his references to the gods and fate, and his darkly poetic style, maybe Thomas Hardy? I felt so at home in Barry’s moral, but not moralising universe that I didn’t want to leave it.
What fascinates me most is the way Barry moves so easily from the earthy to the transcendent, and from the domestic to the divine - and back again, in a vertical line. I loved feeling transported by his many sublime passages of poetry describing soaring falcons, arrows, gold and silver showers of light, oceans, sun and stars, pitch-black nights of existential despair - even cosmic annihilation, whilst being earthed by the humble reality of Tom’s everyday world of comical Indian head-nods, candle-wicks, plant pots, tea leaves, ham sandwiches, sausages and most Irishly of all, potatoes. I was especially impressed and moved to tears by the darkness and light imagery - the way he links the sun itself being quenched by the oceans to the priests’ oceans of lust putting out children’s souls like candle-wicks, to Tom imagining his own final reverse big-bang extinction in the tiny disappearing dot of light in his TV...
In fact, I think Barry celebrates what he sees as the divine in humans. Chiefly, Tom’s meditations - his deep sense of gratitude for everything in creation, of feeling blessed, his god-like conferring of feelings and grace to inanimate objects, even his figure-of-eight Indian head-nod (an infinity symbol) - and most of all, his sense of himself as a protective Cuchulainn, the demi-god figure and son of god of light in Irish mythology. One of my favourite scenes is when Barry expands this idea of human divinity outwards from the cellist, a little ‘god of music’, whose playing creates an invisible sense of ‘holy communion’ between all the neighbours who hear him whilst they dine on the simplest food.
But he moves horizontally too, creating complex, ironic patterns and parallels of language and imagery that are endlessly stimulating. There are intriguing references to ham: Father Matthews the ham-faced butcher of children, and the ironic reversal of his power through the conceit of Tom and June as a human ham-sandwich climbing the mountain to avenge themselves on him. And the humble breadknife, which June bought in the first week of their marriage and used to slice every loaf of bread they ever ate, but the once-tiny baby girl later supposedly uses to kill her powerful patriarchal priestly abuser. It’s a sacred, innocent ‘murder’ weapon that’s never disposed of but stays in Tom’s kitchen - as if to imply that an imaginative act of revenge was enough - and innocent in the hands of Winnie, who puzzlingly uses it to cut ever-smaller sandwiches at her mother’s funeral. But the most memorable for me was the foreshadowing of June’s suicide in the initial images of the burning intensity of their first summer of love, to the ‘fire of freedom’ that Tom experiences in a brief moment of liberation from his earthly burden - ironically just before the shock revelation that June douses herself with kerosene and sets herself alight (maybe her own ‘fire of freedom’?).
I adore the close readings that you do, Shabanah. Your attentiveness to the language is magnificent. You brought to life and elucidated many more symbols than I had in reading, and I'm so grateful to you for explicating them, especially Cuchulainn. I love your characterization of Tom Kettle's world as one filled with human divinity and demi-gods. Are the priests, alternately, demi-demons/ demi-devils? After reading your sumptuous review, it's clear that I need to re-read this book to capture more of the evocative language. I have been thinking about that island that Tom views from his balcony as the underworld or Sheol, and his swimming towards it as his liberation from this mortal coil. You reflected so much of that sublime poetry in your reflection. It's just beautiful. On to read the next one.
Thanks Rebecca, what you say about the priests would make sense but thankfully he doesn’t dignify them with anything that would give them even a dark anti-divine grandeur, but seems to opt instead for images of subhuman predatory beasts. I struggled to understand fully what was happening in that final section but agree it felt like he was heading towards a liberatory suicide in the turbid waters, or what the full significance of the whirlpool effect was. Clearly, I need to re-read all the sea/ocean images, but your idea of an underworld is a very appealing one.
I’ve only just started the novel so apologies for not responding to anything written here - I’m not being rude, just trying hard not to look at the moment so I can avoid spoilers. However, I’m adding an inital response here to the first three chapters while they’re fresh in my mind to keep the discussion going.
Well, at this point I’m SO impressed! It feels like my kind of novel: brilliantly poetic and profoundly humanist writing, centred on an absorbing study of a complex, tormented and morally generous character (Tom remembers the ‘glory of his wicker chair’ and even cares about his night-time toilet trips disturbing inanimate objects in his home and ‘gives them the grace of human feelings’ for being his only companions!). I love how the interior monologue / stream-of-consciousness draws us deep into his psyche and the mental prison he’s trapped in, and I noted many images of prison (including him as a ‘double Jonah’), or temporary release from it, suggesting shame and guilt.
Barry takes what in the hands of a lesser writer would just be a hoary old trope, the retired detective who’s reluctant to answer one last compelling call of duty but eventually does, and takes it to extraordinary, unexpected places. For example, the startling juxtapositions and leaps in the passage in Chapter 2 when the two policemen visit, from ‘O’Casey confessing to an ulcer’ to ‘the chain solemnly flushed’. He takes us from the storm inside the toilet, to the storm outside battering the lean-to, to soldiers in the trenches, to the outrageous climactic image of the explosive volcano that brings all three together and almost makes Tom weep. Well, all that just made me gasp. Bold, original writing that’s simultaneously warmly humane, absurdly funny and intensely life-affirming.
One of the things I look for in truly great writing is a sense of the mystery or unknowability of life, and we certainly get that from the start. All of nature seems animated in these chapters and the sea in particular feels like a powerful, darkly protean force that seems to play a role in pulling Tom back to his calling: ‘Policing always had its salt of danger, like the sea itself.’ I’m also really enjoying Tom’s sense of wonder at all kinds of things in the world - however tiny or big - despite all his despair. So I like the unabashed ease with which Barry infuses his prose with spiritual language like ‘blessed’, ‘grace’, ‘soul’ - even biblical images like ‘threshing the bitter grains of life’ and faintly archaic/elevated language to capture Tom’s almost Romantic affinity with nature: ‘This present sunlight was only a distant cousin of the summer’s, but it was a comfort, it was a herald, it was a joy’.
I’m also finding it very stimulating the way Barry expands that to metaphysical questions of our ultimate human (in?)significance, leaping from micro to macro worlds eg heart-stoppingly, here: ‘‘there was a bracket where the ceiling met the wall, what it had been for he didn’t have an idea. Onions maybe, or some sort of vanished kitchen machine. Or the pin that held the universe in its place?’. Or through references to the gods, and here, to neutrinos (quantum physics?) and the cosmos: ‘You came on everything good by chance. He liked it for its modesty among the bigger efforts. Like a human soul should be in the world, among elephants, galaxies.’ Love the touch of humour in the middle there.
Another thing I’m enjoying is the tiny cast of characters and simple, slowly unfurling plot as I really can’t cope with too much of either of those. I’m one of those people that wish every novel came with a playscript-type character list so I don’t have to waste any mental energy working out who’s who or what’s what, which for me is the least interesting element in a novel. But what I do love is a great stylist - even better, a poetic novelist. I don’t mind living so intensely in Tom’s head in these early chapters, if it means Barry describing minor characters like this: ‘She [Winnie] flamed through the first year, her mother died, she emptied out somehow, she pushed on emptily, she graduated, dressed in her finery, in her grief.’ What beautiful poetic compression, and to end on such a poignant image, merging graduation and mourning clothes….
Excuse my enthusiastic babbling but this is only my first Barry, so I’m very late to the party and over-excited. So many memorably poetic images and I’ve only read three chapters so far!
I’ll return in a couple of weeks or so with my thoughts on the whole novel and read all the comments too, but for now, will just end on a few more that stopped me in my tracks for their epigrammatic power:
‘He knew there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife.’ - perfectly exemplified, I think, by the toilet scene/ suicide attempt.
‘The best things in Ireland were the work of unknown hands. And oftentimes the worst crimes.’ - a clever, dark turn in what must be a sinister reference to priests’ abusive hands.
‘No one minds life as long as they are not trying to leave it. Nor death, as long as they are not dying.’ There speaks a true humanist: we can endure the reality of both life and death.
You're foreshadowing here, on the "darkly protean force" of the sea; keep looking out for it! Lovely elucidation.
Yes, I have that word a number of times in my Kindle notes - foreshadowing to later narrative revelations, but of events in the past, I assume.
Shabanah, this is such a gorgeous and rich meditation on the text and its poetry. I prefer your comment to my post, actually. Beautifully done. You need to post these thoughts elsewhere. At least, I hope you do. What an invitation to linger on the aesthetic and metaphysical richness contained in the text. You captured its spirit exquisitely. I found myself sighing in admiration of the beauty of the prose all over again and nodding along with your sentiments. I too love the Romanticism of Tom 's nature observations mirroring his immediate inner and outer/social worlds, and I'm so glad that's one of the textual themes you centered/ centred. When I got to the scene where Tom narrates O'Casey's gastrointestinal distress, I shook the bed with laughter, a response which I'm sure my sleeping husband did not appreciate. I love the juxtaposition of Tom's keen intelligence and Romantic spirit, which connects his circumstances to sweeping, cosmic mysteries in nature and in the great beyond, to his Rabelaisian bodily preoccupations, which focus on the ageing body and its functions not with a sense of indignity or fear, but with humor, curiosity, and grace/ aplomb.
The sea felt like a greek chorus.
Fantastic writing Rebecca, thanks for sharing!
Oh, what a fascinating notion about the sea! I'll have to ponder that when I re-read the book. So much imagery to consider.
As I’ve reread this discussion for probably the fifth or sixth time (and also discovered a few “new” replies because I really don’t yet understand how to use Substack) I’m developing a thought about Barry’s brilliance. His true ability as a writer just might be the fact that he tells a story in a way that literary intellectual individuals like you two and literary incompetents like me can all fall deeply in love with his work. The more I read you two, the more depth you bring to the story that I love so much, the more amazed I am, the more I want to read OGT again and again and again.
The realization of how much I missed in this wonderful beyond description book saddens me. I think more Tom Sebastian can help.
Happy days to you.
I don't consider you a literary incompetent, whatever that is, but I do think this book requires re-readings. I missed a lot on the first reading, too. I'm trying to write something on Crooked Plow and have just started The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I'm already in love with the writing and narrative voice, and that hasn't happened since OGT! What are you reading?
Lost Children Archive (got an extension from the library) and Love and Summer, William Trevor one daytime the other at night. Just finished Olive Kitteridge. I really liked Crooked Plough and hope it makes the short list, it’s the best of what I’ve read. I had trouble with Seven Moons, probably had more to do with head space than the book. I’ve stopped reading BI long list, after five or six of them , waiting to see what happens on Tuesday.
Seems awfully quiet on BPBC page the last couple of days, maybe everybody is busy reading.
Maybe so. How did you like Olive Kitteridge, and what do you think of Love and Summer and Lost Children Archive? The last one is a personal favorite.
I liked OK, but didn’t love it. I am really enjoying Lost Children Archive, but sense anger on my part rising once I get deeper in (assuming much more on the horror that is our southern border.)
Really like Love and Summer so far, I like the story and the writing style.
I think it's a complicated book, there is just so much to unpack. And we all bounce ideas off each other, I really enjoy both your thoughts and posts, so thank you for sharing them. I also don't think you're literary incompetent. Just last night, I was thinking whether Tom actually killed the priest, because 'June emerged from his coat' in a way that reminded me of body horror. I need to reread that scene again.
Rebecca, I have finally read your stunning review of the novel and love your reading of it through the lens of Orpheus and Eurydice (one of my favourite Greek myths that seems to have inspired so much great art) and Death & The Maiden. I’ve been planning to read that for years having missed all opportunities to see it on stage, but did finally see and enjoy the film at least last year. I also very much agree with what you say about Tom’s storytelling ‘truth’ and non-diegetic music choices etc - lovely way of interpreting it - I sometimes find myself creating edited, filmic versions of my own life! Your choice of ‘aestheticises’ for what Tom does to June’s memory is so well-judged - ‘romanticise’ would go too far and miss the point.
Very belatedly, I’ve finally written up my reaction from notes I made as I was reading, and pasted it below, just adding a few points now in response to one or two of your misgivings/questions about the novel. It was meant to be just a couple of paragraphs, but I found it impossible with a novel that like you say, contains ‘multitudes’. Please excuse typos/incoherence/plot errors (not my forte!)…..
———————————————————————————————————————————————————
Just realised there’s a word limit for the comments, but it doesn’t say exactly how many!?
What an amazing, helpful and well written post. I loved this book but definitely needed help understanding the many threads and devices used the tell the story. Thanks for your excellent work here. Best review of any I read