It is difficult to explain why I like Sebastian Barry’s mournful Booker Prize-nominated On Canaan’s Side better than his current Booker-nominated Old God’s Time, and why all his other lauded works fall somewhere in between, but let me start by saying that Barry is masterful at the craft of writing.

In the past I have been taken by the gentleness of his writing, the poesy, the Irish lilt. That lyricism is evident in Canaan, which begins with the words “Bill is gone,” then continues to take us deep into the world of Irish immigrant Lily Bere as she grieves the suicide of her grandson. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence,” he writes.

Although there is tragedy aplenty in Old God’s Time, it is more difficult to experience. Barry has chosen to write relentlessly long paragraphs that move with a speed and insistence that I found overwhelming. Every word, every sentence in Barry’s work is intentional, so perhaps this style was chosen to blunt the reader’s painful reaction to the subject matter. It certainly did that for me.

The novel’s protagonist is retired policeman Tom Kettle, and the plot revolves around clerical abuse of children in Ireland. The novel constantly hammers at this theme—providing samples in the lives of major characters and in Kettle’s police work—but never slowing down long enough for me to feel the agony.

It’s not that I’m needing to invite more pain—there’s sufficient opportunities just living—but literary works are supposed to make us feel something, and that is hard to do with the spate of words in long paragraphs that rush right past the heart of things, providing tiny details of no value except to distract us—like this excerpt from a paragraph that nattered on for pages:

For the thousandth time he longed for the casual satiety of normal life, but then, when had his life been normal. Or was abnormality the measure of all lives? No doubt. He was nevertheless half adream. He wasn’t absolutely sure of the health of that either. The city was lying under a huge dark belly of cloud, like a child reading his book under a blanket, except there was poor light enough for the city to read by. It was bang on midday, he could hear the bell of the Trinity campanile tolling twelve, he thought it must be, or maybe he was catching on the windless air one of the other churches of Dublin, the Carmelite place the back of Grafton Street, or the old Protestant chapel on Dawson Street.

That’s 131 words out of a 1200-word paragraph. If that is to you of no concern, then ignore my personal reaction to the book, and please do remember that I still consider Sebastian Barry one of our best writers of modern literature.

Jonnie Martin

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