Scan barcode
A review by theshiftyshadow
Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry
Did not finish book. Stopped at 50%.
I felt quite early on that this wasn't for me but I kept ploughing through out of some sort of patriotic sense of duty. After what felt like 2 weeks, but was apparently only 5 days, I gave up.
This book is very slow, which normally I don't mind, but when listening to it on audiobook, speeded up, still feels like you're wading through treacle, it's a touch too slow even for me. I stopped at the halfway point of the book and honestly the plot had only just started to happen. The rest of it was this main character endlessly meandering through his fading memory, and I'm sorry to say none of it was interesting.
My main problem with this book though is how Barry writes about abuse. Look, I'm Irish, I know what went on, whether it was priests, Christian Brothers, nuns, laundries, or any other institution. It's something that hangs heavy over us all as a society, and I have no problem with these things constantly making appearances in Irish writing. However, the detail he goes into when describing it feels completely unnecessary. This may be a generalisation, but I find male writers seem to feel the need to describe these things in horrific detail when really just the mention of priests, laundries etc. is enough to fill the mind with vivid images. Maybe he's written this for an audience that isn't Irish, that doesn't know, but even then it's too much. It screams bad writing to me. (Side note - some of the ways he talks about women, or the main guy repeatedly having a hard on or being aroused, even in relation to his wife, or just describing women felt a bit ick to me)
More than anything what listening to half this book made me think is how extraordinary a writer like Claire Keegan is. Her book, Small Things Like These, treads kind of similar ground to Old God's Time, at least in terms of dealing with the legacy of the Catholic Church, but she does it with so much more skill, and subtlety, and understanding, and she does it with a fraction of the page count too.
Long story short, this is the second Sebastian Barry book I've(kind of) read, and I won't be going back for a third.
This book is very slow, which normally I don't mind, but when listening to it on audiobook, speeded up, still feels like you're wading through treacle, it's a touch too slow even for me. I stopped at the halfway point of the book and honestly the plot had only just started to happen. The rest of it was this main character endlessly meandering through his fading memory, and I'm sorry to say none of it was interesting.
My main problem with this book though is how Barry writes about abuse. Look, I'm Irish, I know what went on, whether it was priests, Christian Brothers, nuns, laundries, or any other institution. It's something that hangs heavy over us all as a society, and I have no problem with these things constantly making appearances in Irish writing. However, the detail he goes into when describing it feels completely unnecessary. This may be a generalisation, but I find male writers seem to feel the need to describe these things in horrific detail when really just the mention of priests, laundries etc. is enough to fill the mind with vivid images. Maybe he's written this for an audience that isn't Irish, that doesn't know, but even then it's too much. It screams bad writing to me. (Side note - some of the ways he talks about women, or the main guy repeatedly having a hard on or being aroused, even in relation to his wife, or just describing women felt a bit ick to me)
More than anything what listening to half this book made me think is how extraordinary a writer like Claire Keegan is. Her book, Small Things Like These, treads kind of similar ground to Old God's Time, at least in terms of dealing with the legacy of the Catholic Church, but she does it with so much more skill, and subtlety, and understanding, and she does it with a fraction of the page count too.
Long story short, this is the second Sebastian Barry book I've(kind of) read, and I won't be going back for a third.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Child abuse, and Sexual violence