"Old God's Time" by Sebastian Barry

 

Sebastian Barry invents a confounding and remarkable protagonist in Old God’s Time (2023). He presents an older man whose life has not been kind to him; he’s a challenging, rather unmoored protagonist, who has faced more than his share of violence and tragedy, and who may perhaps be forgiven for his lapses. If that’s what they are.

Tom Kettle is our character, a retired detective, having plied his trade with a modicum of distinction on the Dublin police force. He sits by himself in his beloved wicker chair in a splendid seaside flat and works at not thinking. A visit from two young detectives throws him off—he feels alternately pleased, doubtful, and panicky. He knows old cases are going to rear their heads, and that’s what panics him. 

Right from the outset, the author works brilliantly to inure us to the rickety fancies of this shambling, awkward man. We begin to learn not to trust all that he sees, and in effect we learn it at the same time as Tom learns it about himself. The happy and not so happy days of his past ambush him, and he must determine how they affect his current days. For one thing, he still idolizes and yearns for his late wife; he aches with the sad remembrance of this loss. Some of Barry’s most poignant passages are uttered or thought by Tom about his dearly departed June: 

As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. 

Passages like these, with the soaring emotional force urgently felt by Tom, crowd this stunning book. The diction, the lilt, the typical phrasing of Irish idiom and culture, all contribute to a memorable, rewarding read. That they share the page with such timeless and weighty human issues is a tribute to Barry’s art. The author pays deep homage to his character and what he stands for, and is utterly justified in doing so.

Old God’s Time is densely plotted, humane in its treatment of careworn characters, and grandly finessed from beginning to end. Very highly recommended.

 

 

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"Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead" by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018.

Name a prestigious literary award, and Olga Tokarczuk has won it: the Nobel Prize and the International Booker (both in 2018); Slovenia’s Vilencia Prize (2013); the Internationaler Brückepreis (2015), for contributing to better understanding among  nations; the Jan Michalski Prize, awarded from Switzerland in 2015; the Prix Laure Bataillon (2019), for literature translated into French; and Poland’s own highest literary award, the Nike, in 2008 and 2015.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead combines a quirky purported madwoman/astrologer, an insular village on a plateau in southwestern Poland, five gruesome deaths (four by murder), and a riotously funny first-person protagonist in a hilarious, sometimes gloomy, treat. I left out sublime and mood-altering descriptions of nature—the forest, the harsh winter, the wildlife, (including beetle larvae)—and apt observations of modern trends and class differentiation. All of it serves the author’s purpose, which is obviously to amuse her readers, while shining an unblinking light on hypocritical modern practices in all their rough-hewn cruelty. It’s quite the variegated pleasure, a multi-layered romp.

The novel’s title is a slightly paraphrased quote from William Blake; our heroine recites it to herself as she watches winter take over her village on All Saints’ Day. She thus observes the inexorable change of seasons; winter seems to last the longest, while spring and summer go by in a flash. She gives everyone pet names, which sometimes become the actual names people go by: Big Foot, Dizzy, Oddball, and Miss Good News, among others. These add to the quirkiness of the character and of the novel; it’s just one more layer of delight on offer.

Be all that as it may, a magisterial justice meted out by nature holds this energetic, told-by-a-dubious-protagonist tale together. And it gives it its lance-like point. I’m all over the lot here, I know, because this book gave me so much pleasure. But the novel is tightly organized, while seeming random; it is wise while seeming silly. The heroine’s internal dialogue is always truly hers: it relies on a shaky foundation of superstition, folklore, and tendentious evidence, but never loses its way toward justice.

Take up this slim volume by one of this moment’s true luminaries. And then move on to the genre-bending Flights, and the comprehensive Books of Jacob. I am somewhat ashamed to say that’s the limit of my exposure to this superb artist. All three are more than worth your while; I’m sure she’ll never produce anything that isn’t.

 

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"Between Two Rivers" by Moudhy al-Rashid

As a reader on, and ponderer about, ancient cultures, my favorite has always been Sumer. They built the first cities, (probably) invented the wheel for transport, and most magnificent of all, invented writing. I wouldn’t call myself a buff, but I do have a 35,000-foot familiarity with the Sumerians. But gosh, has my knowledge grown by leaps and bounds because of Moudhy al-Rashid’s delightful, relatable book, Between Two Rivers.

I didn’t know, for instance, that the cultures that occupied the area after the Sumerians faded, Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylonia, among others, held the Sumerian culture in awe, used Sumerian as a lingua franca long after it was dead (the way Latin functioned in Europe through the Middle Ages), and that cuneiform writing evolved over a couple of thousand years to serve as the typescript for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and Old Persian, and other languages. It finally faded out just as the Common Era began and the Phoenician alphabet gained in use.

This is a scholarly book; it has not only the main text, but a) a listing of Selected Artefacts Cited; b) a Timeline of Ancient Mesopotamian History; c) 23 pages of Bibliography; d) copious endnotes, and e) an index. But not only is Dr. Al-Rashid thorough, she is engaging and relatable. Her delight at holding ancient clay tablets in her hand, her wonder at the advanced math the Sumerians applied to understanding and predicting Jupiter’s orbit … this Oxford University lecturer infects us with her energy and enthusiasm. We cannot help share her delight as she recognizes the feelings, aspirations, and timeless issues experienced so long ago. 

In addition to praising the accomplishments of these clever ancients, al-Rashid singles out certain individuals for focus or special comment. In the 7th century BCE, a Neo-Babylonian king re-instituted the long-abandoned practice of naming a high priestess to the moon god. His daughter was re-named Ennigaldi-Nanna, and we know her because archeologists unearthed clay tablets about the event, and because an archeologist found a room in her newly built palace. The room contained objects from an astonishing range of time, from decades prior to 1500 years in the past. Was Ennigaldi-Nanna a curator of a museum? Were these objects just there together by random chance? We’ll never know, but the author takes this example and shows how it reflected a culture of honoring the past. The ancient princess inspires the author — she represents a kindred spirit from long ago. The author even asks, is it possible she  curated an ancient museum, preserving pieces that were archaic even so long ago?

I’ve read academic texts before, but never one with this kind of personal slant. We learn much about al-Rashid, just as we learn to appreciate the ancient day-to-day women and men trying to get on with life, and apparently succeeding  brilliantly. This book is a multivariate joy: informative, brightly descriptive, and engaging. Take it up!



 

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"The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa

 

Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder 

 

Yoko Ogawa first published The Memory Police in Japan in 1994, under the title Hisoyaka na kesshō; Stephen Snyder’s translation bears a 2019 copyright. This unique tale recounts the strange goings on on a small Japanese island where things are forgotten. More accurately, I should state that things are “disappeared.” And the Memory Police administer people’s compliance with these orders in their iron-fisted way. If this sounds awkward, it’s because it is.

Our unnamed first-person protagonist is a woman in her 30s who is a novelist. Early on we encounter the process of when something is disappeared; the first memorable disappearance is roses. On a sunny morning, the stream outside the novelist’s home bears a curious series of brightly colored, uniformly shaped flat objects flowing on its surface. As people, including our novelist, approach for a closer look, it turns out that rose petals by the hundreds of thousands are floating along the stream, out to sea and oblivion. Immediately afterward, there are no more rose bushes, but the curious thing is, that the people accept it as a matter of course, shrug it off, and plant something new in the space.

Every once in a while something else “is disappeared” (Ogawa’s term for the odd occurrences). Not long after roses disappear, photographs share the same fate, and people, faced with having these odd pieces of paper with images they can’t place, simply burn them all. Not long after that, birds disappear, along with everybody’s memory of them. But: not everybody loses their memories. Rather than be rounded up by the Memory Police, these poor people with healthy memories have to live in hiding, fearing discovery. If the Memory Police find you and cart you off in one of their green trucks, you are never seen or heard from again.

The restraint with which Ogawa tells her tale chills us to the bone. Clearly the book  contains strong elements of totalitarianism and people’s passive acceptance of its ever-more-outrageous depredations. But her novel also treats human memory, society, groupthink, and consciousness. The sheep-like population, including our protagonist, awaits its ultimate fate with hardly a whimper.

Also, Ogawa gilds her story with a novel within the novel — a surreal inversion of her main plot — which adds a frightening fillip to the lessons in the frightening main story.

Told in plain, almost gentle, language, The Memory Police posits its principal lessons for us all to see, and warns us in magisterial terms about bowing to the state’s bullying caprice. This novel will edify you with its through-the-looking-glass approach to modern life and particularly, life in a modern totalitarian state. I rode a roller coaster reading this, and ended up at a high point of appreciation: I had that frisson that I get when I come across reverberant, cunning, effective fiction — when the roller coaster came to a stop, I found myself at a high point of awe and tentative understanding. Read this book; take the ride I did, and join me at the sparkling, enlightened finish.

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