Nobody could really tell him.
“But I’m sure that it doesn’t come from that part of the brain that might be educated or something. And to really get there,I think you have to absent yourself in some curious way and become so concentrated,” he says.
Sebastian Barry says the man who inspired the character of Tom Kettle stayed with him for 60 years.David Levenson
He says there’s a mysteriousness about the way he writes. “There you are and you do your two or three hours of the book when the book comes,and you might wait for a year,of course,before it does. But when it’s coming there is a kind of curious grace about the whole thing. And even if your material is ostensibly dark in a sense,it has to be lovely to write,it has to be the nicest thing you could do in your life.”
We are talking a day after the launch of his latest novel, Old God’s Time,in the bookshop near his home. “It’s just out today. As Johnson says about the birth pangs of the book,the baby is now out and the slap has been delivered. And we’re hoping,you know,the lungs are full of air.”
At the heart ofOld God’s Time is Tom Kettle,a retired detective who spends his days in a rickety apartment built on to the side of a castellated Victorian house in Dalkey. Terrible stories were Tom’s business,writes Barry.
Tom has reached an age when his mind is not as clear as once it was and his reliability as narrator – the book’s in the third person but we are in Tom’s head – is immediately questionable. One thing is clear,his adored wife,June,is dead and he is bereft. And his adult children,Joe and Winnie? Their circumstances are not immediately apparent,to the reader or Tom. “He found he couldn’t tidy his frazzled mind. He was the orphan of his former happiness.”
Next door lives a cellist who likes to shoot at sea birds with his Remington sniper rifle,there is an actress and her son living in one of Mr Tomelty’s other apartments,and there’s the landlord himself,going about his business in a sleek motor.
One night,dark and stormy,two of Tom’s former colleagues,Wilson and O’Casey,come to ask his help on a cold case,something to do with the mysterious death of a priest:“Ah no,Jesus,no,lads,not the fecking priests,no.” Soon the detective superintendent comes calling and,yes,it’s the priests and abuse of children and excursions into Tom’s past,the past of his late wife and the dark stain on the soul of Ireland.
As Barry writes in his prose,distinct as it is beautiful:“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 ...” But old things can be summoned back.
Barry is talking from “the bee room” of his home in the Wicklow mountains,where he has lived for these past 20 years. It’s an old rectory and his writing room is where the rectors would put together their sermons and latterly where the farmer who had the house kept his apiculture equipment.
Barry has had his daily run with his four dogs. “I could just run on a flat and[it would feel like] I’d be running in the mountains,but I do try and run up sometime,although running down – it sounds pejorative – is so much better.”
He reckons his knees are sound because although he took up soccer at the age of 38,he played only three years with Irish novelist and poet Dermot Bolger’s team. He gave up when the twin girls he had with his wife Alison Deegan were little. “I was the last man. Kept there to hack people’s ankles when the ref couldn’t see me.”
Barry “emigrated to America” for his two most recent novels,Days Without End and A Thousand Moons,but is back on home turf inOld God’s Time.Kettle,named for the politician and war poet Thomas Kettle,a line of whose work gave Barry the title of his Booker-shortlisted novelThe Secret Scripture,has been with him since he was seven. Barry was with his mother,the actor Joan O’Hara,and sister in the turret flat of Queenstown Castle in Dalkey. Given the ways of little boys,he was exploring and spotted an annex and poked his nose in. He spotted a “big geezer” in a suit,sitting in a chair,smoking a cigarillo and gazing out to sea.
“He stayed with me for 60 years,which is very odd in itself. And in a sense has allowed me – now as the same age that man was when I saw him myself – to sort of slip into his body and talk about a lot of things that have really bothered me as a grown person in my own life and as a citizen of this country. My aim is to love my country,and so to love it you have to know it well and maybe forgive it a few things.”
The thing that needs knowing is the damage done to children by priests. “Just when you think it’s history and it’s all over,here it comes in another great wave.” In the past few months there have been more than 400 accusations of historical abuse against more than 70 Spiritan priests at Blackrock College (“the Eton of Ireland as they call it,God help us post-colonial eejits”) in Dublin. “It’s not like a few bad apples in the barrel. That’s a pretty stinking barrel.”
Who was once president of the school? Why,one Archbishop John Charles McQuaid,who in Old God’s Time has turned a blind eye to abuse by two priests,Fathers John Byrne and Thaddeus Matthews,“two jackals in a coop devouring little chickens. Filthy,relentless,feckless men who never paused a moment in their evil.”
In real life,Barry says,his grandmother’s first cousin,Patrick Dunne – he has written about the Dunnes in three of his novels – was auxiliary bishop of Dublin and brought a case to the archbishop,but they declined to see it asCrimen pessimum,which meant it had to be reported to the Vatican. It’s the archbishop “who for me or for Tom,I should say,is the worst and largest viper at the side of the road,ready to strike”.
“And you know all over the world that became the modus operandi:say nothing,” Barry says. “To find out that your DNA was making that decision was the first thing that afrighted me into thinking about the whole thing,and that was 20 years ago.”
Barry has fond memories of Australia,not least his first contact,which was via his aunt,the former nun and singer Mary O’Hara,who sent him a toy koala from one of her tours. He still has it – “it’s very worn and a little bit hairless” – and has always worried it was made in the ’60s from a real koala skin.
It was the subject of his very first story,which is now in his archive at the University of Texas. In it,a koala falls out of a tree and hits a panda on the head in the forest below. He’s come a long way in 60 years.
Old God’s Time is published by Faber&Faber at $32.99.
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