You Should Be Reading Sebastian Barry
Five years ago, when Sebastian Barry was appointed laureate for Irish fiction, he delivered a lecture that began with what he confessed was a truism: “All things pass away, our time on Earth is brief, and yet we may feel assailed at great length in this brief time, and yet we may reach moments of great happiness.” The whiplash repetition of “and yet” is typical Barry, and so is the stoic resolve behind the truism, a long, bleak perspective that accedes to the inevitable, with misery and joy cozying up to each other. Reading his novels is like braving Irish weather: You’re chilled and drenched and dazzled and baked in buffeting succession.
His new novel, Old God’s Time, his ninth, is a beautiful, tragic book about an “old policeman with a buckled heart” who’s assailed at great length and yet enjoys streaks of jubilance, even after repeated assaults. I find the book powerful enough to want to bang the drum and say as loudly and clearly as I can that Barry ought to be widely read and revered—he ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere.
Let’s start with the writing, an unclouded lens that, yes, occasionally goes all purple. No surprise to hear an Irish lilt and discover an unabashed delight in metaphor—paragraphs without a simile or three are a rarity. Barry is seems the wrong word for what he does; paragraphs unspool like spells, dreamy incantations, words repeated, cadence summoned. A sample plucked more or less at random from his most resolutely rural novel, (2002): “Oh, what a mix of things the world is, what a flood of cream, turning and turning in the butter churn of things, but that never comes to butter.” A skeptic might dismiss this as a nostalgic ditty with a clunky ending, but as the eponymous Annie knows, “there is a grace in butter, how can I explain it—it is the color we all worship, a simple, yellow gold.” Barry churns and churns, and gold comes out. And so does pitch black. This, from the new novel: “Tar melting in tar barrels, roadmenders. The lovely acrid stink of it.”
