![]() It is an extraordinary piece of work to borrow a word that recurs in its pages, it is stupendous, in the sense that it shocks and astonishes. Sebastian Barry at home in rural Wicklow: He recalls listening to survivors on the radio: 'The not speaking had been, I suspect, under such enormous pressure that it actually had been turned into a sort of poetry.' Photograph: Alan Betson But such still contentment is not always easy, or even possible, to achieve. Gazing out at the sea, he ponders, “was the whole point of retirement, of existence – just to be stationary, happy and useless”. Tom Kettle is a retired detective, a widower now living in the annex of a Victorian house in Dalkey in the 1990s whether he is peaceably sitting in his wicker chair, smoking a cigarillo, or immured there by traumatic memory is the question the novel probes. There is the parallel he draws between being a writer and the Beano cartoon The Numskulls, in which human activity is guided by miniature creatures living inside our heads (“that’s good, because they’re actually much cleverer”).īut these moments of levity punctuate a much darker – necessarily, inevitably so – exchange about Barry’s new novel, Old God’s Time, which introduces readers to a central character outside of the McNulty-Dunne family axis that has populated his work from 1998′s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, via The Secret Scripture, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, to his most recent American excursion, A Thousand Moons. There was a more recent trip to Sydney for a literary festival, in which he and Roddy Doyle went in search of togs so that they could take a swim on Manly Beach and were presented with a moth-eaten specimen from the second-hand pile – “this terrible, terrifying, literally terrifying, pair of yellow togs” – by a shopkeeper who judged them to be short of funds. There was the time when, as a very young man, he cut off his waist-length hair and sold it for £100 to fund running away to Paris to become a writer. ‘Nobody writes like, nobody takes lyrical risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.The conversation I have with Sebastian Barry in front of a flickering fire in his Wicklow home, the smallest of his four dogs curled up on my lap, is studded with lively remembrances and gentle humour. Told in Sebastian Barry’s rare and masterly prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman’s journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Old God’s Time (March 2023), Sebastian Barry’s stunning new novel, available to pre-order nowįrom the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without EndĮven when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live…
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