56 pages • 1 hour read
Sebastian BarryOld God's Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Tom anticipates visiting Fleming soon. He buys a new toothbrush and products to deep clean his apartment as though he were leaving, though he isn’t. He thinks the shopkeeper is silently hostile toward his purchases as they cross gender roles, but he is friendly as he leaves. Looking at his apron, Tom thinks about how forensics make the old, violent methods of extracting information obsolete. He also recalls the unwritten rules that the police could not interfere with domestic violence or church-run orphanages and institutions.
He suddenly realizes he forgot his cap, and he thinks about how he forgets a lot of things these days. He bumps into Tomelty, who is dressed finely in contrast to his usual gardening clothes. Tomelty asks Tom for a favor as a retired policeman, which panics Tom, but he just wants Tom to turn a blind eye to his other tenant’s arrangement with a wealthy older man. Tomelty comments that in the past, she would have been condemned, referencing the Catholics; Tom realizes Tomelty is Protestant. Tom agrees with him.
Tom wonders what it would have been like to grow old with June. He remembers her physicality and the way she orgasmed. He feels anger at what took her away. Tomelty invites Tom inside, and Tom passes a man who must be the tenant’s older patron on the stairs—the man ignores Tom. Mrs. Tomelty offers him a drink; he sits with the Tomeltys in their living room as the moon rises. Mrs. Tomelty says that his strong presence is welcome in the house, especially with the little girl and boy, though Tom has not seen any girl. Mrs. Tomelty is an expert in tea roses and she shows him a beautiful book she wrote; Tom hadn’t realized there was more than one variety of tea rose, though he has studied wildflowers in relation to corpses. Tomelty never speaks over Mrs. Tomelty. Tom notices a unicorn in the corner of the room.
Chapter 5 Summary
Tom sleeps fitfully that night. He is aware of his aging body’s weaknesses and unsightliness. He remembers his mixed feelings about his son Joe being happy to leave Ireland for The United States.
Tom recalls June growing distant when the children were young, though she’d been fine when they first met in Dunleary. He was with his colleague Billy Drury, investigating the murder of an unknown young woman with severed hands. June waitressed in the Wimpy Café. He remembers their first informal date—they sat in the sunshine on the pier in Monkstown, with the smell of the fishing trawlers around them. They first had sex outside in a hollow near the sea. At first, they were both reluctant to reveal personal information, and for the same reason. June grew up in an orphanage; when she was 11, she snuck into the office and found the passport photo of her mother. A nun caught her and punished her. Mrs. Carr, who fostered her for a time, tried to come between June and Tom; Tom hated her.
He remembers making a rushed, long journey after work every day to see June. She’d wear stylish, hippy denim and tell him about her day. He couldn’t go to her lodgings, which were Catholic and for women only. One day, they sheltered in an archway in the rain, and she initiated sharing details about their pasts for the first time. They’d both had harsh upbringings in orphanages. They decided to get married. He sensed there was more to say.
Chapter 6 Summary
Winnie visits Tom one sunny morning. She is beautiful, and she wears a mustard coat he remembers well: It has a picture of Marilyn Monroe on the back. Tom makes her tea with two sugars; the kettle was a housewarming gift from her. Winnie used to love hearing his stories of being a young officer in Dublin and about his sense of community; as a police officer, he both punished and protected people.
Tom remembers throwing out June’s things after she died, accidentally including their photos. He can’t remember where Winnie lives. To his horror, she says she is in Deansgrange, in the cemetery. After she leaves, he dries her teacup repeatedly, chuckling at the unlikelihood of her living in Deansgrange. He recalls her success and ambition as a lawyer, and her feminist rage, wanting to reform the misogyny embedded in Irish law and culture. This reminds him of an archbishop, McQuaid, who was central to a specific horrible event involving priests. Tom thinks about his old colleague Billy; he remembers that Billy was shot while he was off-duty and tried to prevent a robbery. He suddenly recalls that his own wedding dinner, during which Billy gave a speech, was at the Tomelty’s Hotel. Tom finds it odd that he hadn’t realized this before.
He remembers how happy he was as he and June left for their honeymoon in northern France. There, June told him more about her childhood in the orphanage. She was desperately lonely; the nuns physically abused the children, making them work. Tom recalled the abuse he experienced in his orphanage from the brothers and the other children; he’d already told June about this and hoped she could tell him things, too. She revealed that she was repeatedly raped by Father Thaddeus, the priest who came to say mass every morning, from when she was 6 until she turned 12. Others were, too. The nuns and the doctor who treated her for her injuries acted oblivious. She challenged Tom to still love her now that he knew this; he thought nothing could change his love for her. He remembered seeing the crushed spirits of the boys who were raped by the brothers in his orphanage. He marveled at June’s soul being here now, alive. He comes back to the present while still drying Winnie’s cup.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters explore the dissonance of Systemic Violence in Institutions that are built to help people. Tom refers to police violence in the previous section, which was used both as retribution and to extract information. However, in this section, he mentions how the police force also enables other institutional violence through complicity. He recalls the unspoken rules that there are domains beyond the police force’s reach: Men can beat their wives or children, and anyone who flees an abusive laundry or orphanage must be returned. Tom acquiesces with this code, despite having personal experience with severe trauma he endured in these institutions, and despite the fact that he has dedicated his life to upholding the law and seeking justice for wrongs. Within Tom, there is a conflict between his personal ethos and his institutional ethos; he also embodies the contradiction between his institution’s purpose and its actual behavior.
The novel also explores this theme through its portrayal of the church-run orphanages in which both Tom and June were abused as children. Their experiences are even more traumatic because they were perpetrated by those who were supposed to represent safety. The church is supposed to be a haven, which is why sexual, physical, and mental abuse in church-run institutions is especially shocking and traumatic. In addition, other institutions—like the police force and medical establishments—defer to the church’s power and refuse to acknowledge or report these crimes, highlighting the extreme vulnerability and powerless of the abused children within these institutions.
The novel explores the tension between The Search for Healing and The Lasting Impact of Trauma through the dichotomy of Tom and June’s love and happiness with the permanence of their trauma. Tom’s detailed descriptions of their courtship play into conventions associated with the romance genre: He recalls their first date and the first time they had sex, and he uses poetic, hyperbolic language to describe June—for example, he says he found her “so lovely he could barely breathe” (73). This tone is juxtaposed against the graphic descriptions of the cruelty and abuse she endured as a child. June describes this herself in dialogue, in a long, unbroken paragraph in simple language, referencing her age at the time the abuse started—she was only six—and communicating her distress. This removes the sensationalizing or voyeuristic tone typical of a murder mystery or thriller; she tells the story through her voice, which humanizes her. Her description of this trauma contrasts with the setting—Tom and June are on their honeymoon. The ideal of romance is juxtaposed with the true love and commitment Tom has for June—he opens himself up to her traumatic past. Tom notes that June speaks to him in “her smallest voice, but there was in it a seam of strength, the strength she had won for herself […] the strength even of their present love” (96). Despite her story, she laughs and marvels that they are alive together. This scene shows that though love may not heal trauma, people can find some healing through love even while their trauma remains.
This section also introduces tokens of the novel’s magical realist elements, highlighting the theme of Subjective Reality Versus Objective Reality by distancing Tom’s narration from an accurate objective reality. The fantastical elements have metaphorical meaning, rather than purely reflecting his confused mental state. Tom is experiencing time strangely—he notes that it seems to get dark very fast. Throughout his interaction with the Tomeltys, Tom’s mental state is variable: His emotions swing about for reasons unrelated to real events, and he is easily moved to tears or laughter. He loses track of the conversation and gets confused; at one point he can’t even form full sentences. The moon and the darkness create an otherworldly atmosphere, and Tom senses music though he can’t hear any. The narration foreshadows the twist that Mrs. Tomelty is actually dead: Tom thinks her dress is “the colour of shadows” (63), reminding him of ghosts. These features create ambiguity, but the unicorn in the room signals a fantasy element; it blurs the lines of reality by relating Tom’s perceptions of reality to myth, which holds symbolic truth.
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