Sebastian Barry: ‘A vigilance is required of us as human beings’

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. 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.

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 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”).

But 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. 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. Gazing out at the sea, he ponders, “was the whole point of retirement, of existence – just to be stationary, happy and useless”. But such still contentment is not always easy, or even possible, to achieve.

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. For what Tom Kettle remembers – in a series of trancelike scenes that dissolve physical and temporal boundaries, leaving both he and the reader unsure of what is real, or where or when it is happening – is his own experience of childhood abuse at an industrial school, and the even more grievous and devastating institutional sexual violence visited upon his wife, June.

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The adjectives “lyrical” and “poetic” often attach themselves to Barry’s writing, and they are in evidence here, too, from the figuring of the basements of a police station as “the ancient ground of the city, where the devils lived in echoing caves” or the description of a lawn-mower’s “levers and gears like the ears and whiskers of some exotic animal in the zoo, or the curious shooting ears of the wild Irish hare”. But Old God’s Time has more than one register, and most arresting of all is the stark, pared-down explicitness with which Barry details the horrors endured by Tom, June and other children placed by the State in the care of religious orders.

“There’s almost a medical reason for that or human reason,” Barry explains to me. “I found in a completely different context, in an effort to explain to someone what had happened to a third party – let’s put it that way – I would try and be clear about what I was talking about with this person. And I would find that if I went back to them six months later, and referred in any way to what I had described, they would have erased it. And they’d say, What do you mean? What are you talking about? What?”

As a result, he continues, he felt that it was his duty to “write it down. Because there’s a reason why people like Tom were socially erased, and people who have the same experiences. It was because no one wants to think about that. Nobody wants to have that in their head.”

He is keenly aware that his job is one of fiction – “it’s just a novel, it does come under the heading of entertainment, allegedly”. But he is adamant that it comes with responsibilities. “There is a vigilance required of us as human beings when it comes to the protection of vulnerable people. Because, apart from anything else, all the things he’s experienced, the telling of it, the aftershock of it, the actual explosion of lava from the volcano that has been created in him, can happen 30 or 40 years later. In a way, the guarding of children is futile to some degree, because let’s not think for one moment that such things are not happening now. They are. They’re happening, I’m sure in this country and in many countries, all countries, maybe wherever humans are. But a sort of vigilance could be at least one arrow in the quiver.”

In the novel, June is raped by a priest when she is six years old, and repeatedly thereafter until she is 12. A doctor examining her ripped anus suggests to a nun that she may have sat on a twig; as she elaborates these attacks to Tom on their honeymoon, he is flooded with memories of his own experiences of a Brother, “and the smell of urine, and the merciless lashing, the stick on his back, on his legs, every night for a thousand years, world without end, and him getting off lightly compared to other boys…” Their love story, their marriage and the birth of their two children is, at a certain angle, a victory over the barbarity of their childhoods; but that volcanic lava is still there.

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Barry was aware that writing so uncompromisingly could be “an inelegant, ungenerous, demanding thing to do to a reader”, but insists that it is vital. “Unless you have a picture, you literally don’t know what you’re talking about. And even a word like child abuse is kind of vague, when you’re actually talking about rape.” He recalls the difficulties he faced, in the workroom feet away from where we sit, “your head rocking back and forth from what you were putting on paper. But that’s Tom’s and June’s bucket of acid, that they’ve been bathed in, that their little hearts and souls were popped into to gratify whatever appetites of priests. And I mean, I am violently against having a priesthood now, I will be honest about it. I really think they should disband if they could be safely monitored.”

He himself was also taught by priests, and had what he and his schoolmates called at the time “a couple of dodgy priests” in his school. “It was all at the level of humour, by the way,” he recalls, also remembering men in late middle age calling boys up to their rooms individually to tell them “the facts of life”, “literally touching your body to show you”. It was, he says, a sort of “grooming atmosphere that was pervasive and almost universal”, rooted in the belief that children, until they were workers, were worthless.

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Some of the details of abuse in Old God’s Time – the horrifying image of babies strapped to potties, for example – were gleaned from official reports into the institutional abuse of previous decades. And Barry also found himself reading Founded on Fear, Peter Tyrrell’s posthumously published account of his childhood in St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack, Co Galway, in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a vivid, fragmentary piece of work compiled from letters Tyrell wrote to Senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, and brought to publication by the late academic Diarmuid Whelan, who discovered them while working on the politician’s papers. Tyrrell, who in his lifetime failed to gain widespread attention for his story, burned himself alive on Hampstead Heath in 1967. “He was sending this reader a message,” says Barry, and the message went something like this: “I tried to do this through Sheehy-Skeffington. Would you ever get a move on yourself there, Mr effing Barry? With all your high-toned talk and bullshit.”

Barry also recalls listening to a group of survivors talk of what they had suffered as children on the radio, and being struck by their extreme eloquence: “The not speaking had been, I suspect, under such enormous pressure that it actually had been turned into a sort of poetry.”

But many must have remained silent; many, like Peter Tyrrell, must have ultimately found the trauma too hard to bear. “My feeling about it is that we can call it child rape, but actually, it is a form of murder. For some people, you actually murdered them. And whether or not they take 40 or 50 years to die, actually, in law, that’s still murder. And that’s what I think about it. They got away with murder.”

Paradoxically, Old God’s Time also draws on much happier memories. The castellated house, divided into separate properties, to which Tom Kettle withdraws, is a real place, and when he was seven years old, Barry lived in its turret flat (occupied, in the fictional version, by a certain Miss McNulty). He, his mother and his sister rented it for nine months while Barry’s architect father was working in England. Like a little boy who fleetingly appears in the narrative, Barry too collected coupons and sent away for a box camera, only to receive instead “a fecking plastic Fred Astaire stick”. One day, Barry peered into the house’s annex and saw “a big man sitting on the wicker chair smoking a cigarillo, without looking back. It was like the Hamlet ad – he looked so content. And I suppose I was interested as a little boy in content men, not disturbing, kind of trampy men. I may have been told he was a retired policeman, I really don’t know. But maybe my default position vis-a-vis the book is cherchez le policeman.”

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In his last two books, the Costa-winning Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, he has ranged across West Tennessee in the company of Thomas McNulty, his lover John Cole and their adoptive daughter, Winona, but now he was back on the eastern edge of Ireland, and in “a little sunstruck paradisiacal time for us”. It was during that episode that Barry, who had previously been at school in London and failed to learn how to read, began to make progress by connecting the words of the catechism with the marks on the page: “So I literally learned to read off religion, and a lot of good it did me, you might say!” Across the road from his school was a slaughterhouse, “and we used to play marbles in the blood and entrails that were just pouring out of this emporium” – exactly the kind of image that might come in useful for a novelist in later life.

Strangely, Tom Kettle’s annex also feels like a redoubt of a type, in which he is holed up, far from the ghosts of Dublin city. His sojourn is interrupted by the arrival of two young policemen eager to talk to him about a cold case – semi-comic characters who, despite a mission that fills him with unease, have a touch of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, and a scene in which a storm forces them to share a lilo on Tom’s inhospitable floor, a compelling blend of farce and a Western. Throughout, the entire novel plays host to strange emissaries, time slippages and confusion, which, I tell him, put me in mind of a Bergman film.

He is delighted: his mother, the actor Joan O’Hara, was such a fan of the director that she titled her autobiography Dear Mr Bergman because she so wanted him to cast her in one of his films. There is a lot of his mother’s atmosphere in the book, he says: “She was the great author of extravagant information, so she heightened everything: that was her job as a mother.” She was also a great holder of seances. “Her favourite writer was not Henry James but MR James, Montague Rhodes James, and all she read mostly was ghost stories. So the house was absolutely double-stocked, it was like a grocery for ghosts that she would then create.”

Old God’s Time also has room for some ghostly echoes of Barry’s other novels. There’s Tom Kettle’s neighbour, Miss McNulty, but also her father, barely seen, who turns out to be The Temporary Gentleman’s Jack McNulty; June’s funeral is officiated by a humanist pastor, “Mr Grene from the grocery store at the roundabout”; Tom’s son, Joe, goes to work in the Zuni pueblo familiar from his American novels. It was, Barry says, “kind of wonderful to escape out the window of the family house”, but this novel nonetheless maintains its links to the fictional universe he has so carefully constructed. His characters, he imagines, are somewhere, “all talking to each other; hopefully they don’t drink or smoke, because I’d be very annoyed if they did. But they’re having coffee.”

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A final piece of supporting evidence: The Secret Scripture’s title is taken from a sonnet entitled “To My Daughter Betty, Gift of God”, and its closing lines. “Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, / Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,- / But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed / And for the secret Scripture of the poor.” The poem’s author, a soldier, politician and friend of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was called Thomas Kettle.

There are more prosaic borrowings: those terrifying yellow togs finally make it into a novel – Barry has written to Roddy Doyle to alert him – and Tom’s lacklustre cooking, in the form of sweating chicken hash, tinned frankfurters and “Welsh rarebit” concocted with plastic cheese slices, was Barry’s grandfather’s preferred diet (“he ended up with the most ferocious ulcers”).

Aware of the novel’s painful subject matter, Barry says he has broken his rule and been peeking at advance reaction on the website Goodreads, a perilous business for any writer. To his relief, its readers have not only coped, but directed their attention towards his descriptions of the charming seaside setting. “Dalkey may find a little lift in its tourism!” he laughs.

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I suspect that will not be the lasting impression of Old God’s Time. Another of Barry’s spiritual companions throughout has been Einstein. “I’m almost obliterated by his theory of time,” Barry explains. “And I probably refer to it far too often for people’s comfort.” But it made sense to him not only as a way of understanding how people may apprehend their own histories, but also as a route to holding on to the love and the people they have lost; to understand that they are, in some way, still present.

At 67, Barry has no plans to slide into his own wicker chair; retirement, he has gathered, “is apparently a pain in the backside anyway, whichever way you look at it”. Whether his fiction returns to the larger family picture, stays in Ireland or returns to America is still to be determined, and for the time being, he’s still in the land of Tom Kettle: “Sad stations of memory but now he had the strength for it. It must have risen out of the deep Dalkey earth. A boon to him, a benefice. The dust offering him a gift. And now he was of a mind to take it. Something creeping into his old noggin, a type of wondering pride.”