Old God's Time

“[T]he Kish Lighthouse herself would begin to show her heavy light, laboriously sweeping the heaving deeps. He thought of the fish in there, lurking.”

The metaphor of light in the dark mirrors Wilson and O’Casey seeking out the truth and Tom’s need to confront the truth of his past. The quote shows that this is grueling, difficult work, especially with the words “heavy” and “laboriously.” The depths of the sea symbolize the secrets buried in the past. The lurking fish represent an avoidance of the truth; these lines present them ambiguously, since they could be either threatening or vulnerable as they hide, reflecting the duality of Tom’s secrets.

“[A] gull dropped the full height of the frame […] so out of control, like a suicide or an executed thing, that it threw him.”

This incident alludes to Tom’s PTSD. A normal occurrence reminds him of suicide or execution, highlighting the significance these had in his life. These include June’s suicide, his own shooting of Malayan rebels, and the state executions he has witnessed; he associates the latter with Matthews’s murder, which he sees as both a punishment for crime and a punishable crime. Tom has a physical reaction and flinches, which is typical of PTSD. He characterizes something “out of control” as frightening and necessarily violent, exposing his own experiences of violence and explaining why he found the rigid structure of the police force appealing.

“[He] dropped the rope into the umbrella stand, which had no umbrella. It was just a long brass shell from one of the big wars.”

The umbrella stand is a shell case, representing the lingering presence of violence in the domestic and everyday world; it also interweaves personal and large scale violence. The presence of a bomb in Tom’s house represents the huge impact that domestic terrorism had on civilian life. Tom speaks casually about “the big wars.” Violence is part of the fabric of his life and society and is not particularly noteworthy. The fact that there is no umbrella indicates an absence of shelter; Tom is vulnerable to the outside world and to the pain of his past.

“[T]he weather had shifted outside, the thick clouds were gone, the wind was still, and a huge blue light was scarred by tatters of moonlight and the gauzy remnants of the cloud.”

The weather builds tension, which is an example of pathetic fallacy. The stillness and darkness creates a sense of the limbo of night, mirroring the suspense Tom is in now that the events of his past have re-emerged. The blue light is otherworldly, enhancing the idea that Tom is in a liminal space between light and dark, truth and fantasy, and past and present. The scars, “tatters,” and “gauzy remnants” connote the wounds of the past, while the absence of clouds indicates a revealing of truth.

“[T]here would have been no mercy for such a person. None. Denounced from the pulpit in the…By the Catholic…”

Religious and social structures in Ireland had a lot of power: In the past, Miss McNulty would have been ostracized and punished for immoral behavior—not by law, but by the church and community. The monosyllabic word “none” highlights the brutality and finality of this judgment. However, this example demonstrates the dangers of making assumptions as the novel later reveals that she is not engaging in sex work. This quote also demonstrates the continued complexities and tensions of religion in Ireland: Tom realizes Tomelty is a Protestant, creating potential awkwardness between them.

“[H]ad she dropped from the sky? An angel with severed hands.”

Tom indicates the helplessness he and his colleagues felt while investigating cases with no leads, especially before the police used DNA and other forensic sciences. The body of the murder victim seems as if it has appeared from nowhere, and Tom romanticizes this image because it is easier to mythologize her rather than face the reality of her suffering. This reflects the use of fantasy and myth elsewhere in book. Her severed hands represent the helplessness of victims of violence, while the image of an angel suggests her innocence, mirroring the destruction of innocence in the priests’ abuse of children.

“[H]e gave his luxuriating daughter—she professed to love that wicker chair too—her tea, two sugars…”

This quote illustrates the solidity of Winnie’s presence for Tom: She physically interacts with objects in his flat. Tom expresses his love and care for her by making her tea. His description of her “luxuriating” in his flat projects the life he wishes he could have given her, full of ease and comfort. The sugar reiterates this wish, but it also suggests that this scene is not in the same physical reality as the rest of the book since Tom has no sugar in his flat. The wicker chair symbolizes peace and safety throughout the book; Winnie’s professed love of it expresses Tom’s wish that his daughter have these.

“[H]e darkened his mind and bagged them all up.”

This is one of Tom’s coping mechanisms for dealing with the traumas he has lived through. He deliberately dissociates from the painful task of throwing out June’s things after her death. This action of throwing things out also mirrors the way that Tom blocks out painful parts of his past. However, he accidentally throws out all their old photos, too; this is the danger of dissociating, since it can lead to obscuring even the good memories.

“‘I’d better say it now,’ she said, ‘since these fecking nice Frenchies can’t understand a word of it.’”

The author uses dialogue to tell June’s story to ensure it is told from her perspective, which grants her narrative agency. She chooses to tell Tom about her past in France, where her words can’t be understood; this shows her shame about her past and her awareness of its shock value to other people. This language difference is also a metaphor for the boundary between abuse survivors and the rest of the world—other people cannot understand the trauma of their experience.

“[T]he looser items of the street, and the window glass, all turned into weapons now, against the soft bodies of the citizens.”

Tom’s PTSD is apparent in the vivid detail with which he remembers this scene. The horrors of domestic terrorism in civilian life are enhanced because everyday objects and the structures of the city itself are weaponized. This shows the subversion of the expectation of communal safety, and it also reflects that the causes of the Irish Troubles were interwoven with features of everyday life (such as religion and community). The word “soft” highlights the vulnerability of the human body to violence.

“[A] deep lurch of panic was in him […] as if his body in fact also went down through the floorboards and into the secret places of the station.”

Tom’s experiences a panic response to apparently being in the station and seeing the pictures of the priests. However, he does not have the same response when the scene plays out in reality, showing how his mind has prepared him for this event. His sensation of disappearing into the depths of the building suggests a desire to hide, but it also indicates his sensation of being trapped in the station, both by the current investigation closing in on his past and in his previous role as a detective, which defines his identity. This quote also mentions the secret layers that exist within the organization, hinting at the police’s complicity in covering up the priests’ crimes.

“The eternal fight in the solar system between night and day was happening above him […] night was winning, but still, it was ridiculously early to be abed.”

The author frames the cycle of day and night as a constant battle, which is a metaphor for the battle between forces of good and evil in the world. This includes the justice and healing that Tom seeks and the cycles of trauma and violence he has experienced. His statement that “night was winning” suggests the continued impact of his trauma, as well as the continued injustices and violence happening at a societal level. However, his statement that it’s too early for bed symbolizes that he is not ready to give up on the struggle for justice.

“[T]he long trek into town […] and the passing from his character as father and husband into his character as policeman and colleague, a curious transition that in the evening would be reversed, in the eternal see-saw of his life, of everyone’s life.”

Sebastian Barry explores the experience of playing different roles in life. He emphasizes Tom’s total compartmentalizing of these identities and his use of the journey into Dublin to allow himself to transition between them. This compartmentalizing allows Tom to live a rich domestic life while witnessing, and sometimes performing, violence in his job. It also reflects his compartmentalizing of his memories by blocking out those that are too distressing. Barry uses the image of an “eternal see-saw” to indicate that the world and human experience are full of contradictions.

“‘I didn’t kill no priest,’ he said. There was a faint hint of humour in his answer, echoing the double negative that priests were supposed to have offered during penal times when they were captured, to avoid the sin of a lie.”

Tom’s answer hints that he was involved in Matthews’s murder, building the crime and mystery element of the plot. He refers to the practice of equivocation by using a double negative. Equivocation is the practice of phrasing an idea in a way that avoided a technical lie but still did not reveal the truth. Equivocation was famously used by Catholic priests during their persecution in Protestant countries in the post-Reformation. In Ireland, this was tied to colonization: the suppression of the majority Catholic religion was performed by the Protestant English state. This quotation encapsulates the long and complex history of the Catholic Church in Ireland as both a persecuted entity and a perpetrator of persecution, and it highlights the self-perpetuating nature of violence. Tom’s answer implies that since the church has justified lying, he can, too, exposing Byrne’s hypocrisy in accusing him of violence.

“Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone.”

Tom conceptualizes time this way in relation to Fleming bringing his past to his door. This shows that—as with the walkers in his visual metaphor—something that seems to have vanished can return. His description of time as belonging to God implies its healing power through its ability to create distance from events; however, in reality, Tom’s trauma remains close to the surface. This quotation includes the book’s title, which has several layers of meaning. The word “old” implies a mythical element, relating to the pre-Christian Irish stories Tom mentions elsewhere. This places the book’s events into the larger context of the story of humanity as a whole, with its changing spirituality and culture, but its universal need for spirituality to process the passing of time. However, it also suggests a god whose time is up, suggesting a diminishing faith in the Catholic god of the past, by both Tom and Irish society more broadly.

“The famous unwritten unseen hidden document.”

This is how Tom conceptualizes “God’s plan.” His comparison of it to a document references both the textual basis of organized religion, including Catholicism, and his and Billy’s work in the police force, documenting everything they did. Barry evokes the fundamental mystery of existence as the document is “hidden”; this also shows Tom’s frustration at the randomness and unfairness of life. He wrestles with his agency in the face of what has happened to him at the church’s hands. The fact that the document is “unwritten” ties together the competing ideas of human agency and fate that co-exist in Christian ideology since God is omnipotent, yet people have free will.

“They had gently communicated the core truths of each other in five seconds, remarkable.”

This quotation solidifies June’s centrality in Tom’s life; the core truth he has communicated to the cellist is his loss of her. This moment of open communication brings comfort: Tom marvels at his sense of deep connection, while the word “gently” reflects the non-judgmental quality Tom sees in the cellist. Tom feels a spiritual connection with him, which continues in this scene as they experience his music of atonement together. At this time, Tom feels that June is with him. This interaction enables Tom to move toward a sense of resolution in the final chapters of the book, and it counters his previous isolation. This quote highlights the importance of spirituality and narrative in creating meaning, whether the cellist is real, imagined by Tom, or an otherworldly being.

“His sergeant had given him a booklet about Arab feast days and holy days, and Jewish feast days and holy days, so he wouldn’t cause offence to the inhabitants. As if his gun wouldn’t do that all on its own.”

Tom highlights the incongruity of the use of force to seek peace by juxtaposing the use of a booklet to be culturally sensitive against the brutality of armed combat. He presents an absurdity in the idea of an Irish regiment in the British army going to Palestine during the formalization of the state of Israel, with the differences between these four national identities and cultures. The discussion of feast days and holy days evokes the religious tensions in Ireland, which are also interlinked with questions of state, identity, and a complex past. Tom’s connection to the cellist’s rendition of “Kol Nidrei” shows the possibility of spiritual meaning that supersedes the differences of organized religion.

“[I]t was late May, coming to June, so now he must credit all things he saw to summer.”

Tom describes the turning of the seasons, drawing attention to the cyclical and healing nature of time as the light and warmth overpowers the winter. This pathetic fallacy mirrors Tom’s growing sense of peace as he finds a sense of redemption and acceptance of his past. However, Tom also plays with the word “June” elsewhere in the book, skipping between its meanings as a month and as the name of his wife. Here, the emergence of June symbolizes that he is finding his way toward processing everything, without blocking parts out. His phrasing, “coming to June,” also suggests that he will reunite with her soon (in death).

“Fresh green shoots, like time beginning all over again, or time perpetually present. Eternal Mr. Tomelty.”

Barry layers symbolism into this description. He uses Tomelty’s garden to build imagery of rebirth and healing, indicating that both Tom and Ireland may be able to heal from their pasts. The garden specifically has connotations of Eden or paradise, representing a lost innocence and safety, and suggesting Tom’s proximity to death. Tom’s description of Tomelty as “eternal” in tending his garden places him in the role of a guardian-like spirit or god, and the ancient imagery he uses of “time beginning” and the green plants recalls the pre-Christian mythology referenced elsewhere, which was often tightly connected to the outside world. In the same paragraph, Tom thinks of him and the otherworldly cellist as “his new brace of friends.” Barry blurs the line between their existence as real people, Tom’s projections onto them or imaginings of them, and their existence as deities or ghosts. He suggests that some spiritual entity is looking out for Tom, whether in his mind or in a broader world, and he points to the comfort and meaning that can be found in myth.

“Every ten minutes she put herself into his arms and he put his arms around her. She repeated this like an Alzheimer’s patient.”

Winne and Tom have a strong bond, which is obvious as they comfort each other after June’s death. In comparing Winnie to “an Alzheimer’s patient,” he portrays the confusion and incomprehensibility of bereavement. He also shows that Winnie turns to repeated patterns in her attempt to find comfort, foreshadowing the addiction that will kill her.

“After a while he was shown the ancient wall paintings and drawings, marked on the underhanging parts of cliffs, that no storm or rain had ever erased.”

This act shows the community and connection that Joe built in The United States. Joe mirrors and subverts Tom’s story. Both of them needed to escape the context of their trauma and grief. Tom became a sniper in Malaya for the British Army, enacting violence on the local populace just as the British had enacted violence in Ireland. However, Joe became a doctor and moved to the United States as an escape, serving a community that also experienced a history of colonization and disenfranchisement. Joe is able to find new meaning in the people and culture around him. The paintings also tie into the novel’s exploration of the importance of spirituality, including stories and art, across cultures. The storm in the first chapter represents violence and trauma, so their survival despite storms illustrates the power of art and spirituality to supersede violence.

“Malaya was further away than Albuquerque, but Tom never travelled so far.”

Barry uses this comparison to show that Tom’s feeling of distance is symbolic rather than literal. It reflects the culture shock he experiences at the United States’ similarities and differences, but also the brutal nature of his long journey. He does not eat or drink during his multiple layovers; he keeps remembering putting Winnie and Joe to bed as children. Tom’s journey represents his processing of the information that his son his dead. His feeling of alienation on arrival recalls June telling him her story in France, so that no one around can understand her. This shows the isolation of grief, which creates a sense of separation from others.