Readers who enjoyed Sebastian Barry’s last two novels – Days Without End, which won the Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize, and its sequel A Thousand Moons – will be eager to read this new one. It is likewise admirable and enjoyable, but in a different way, different and more demanding. It is, apparently, on a smaller scale, lacking the narrative pace and humour of these books. It is a murmuring, introspective novel, and it begins very slowly – so slowly indeed that you might wonder if it is ever going anywhere, even though two characters whose visit promises a story appear early. Persevere, however, and you will be richly rewarded.

Tom Kettle is is a retired Irish policeman. For nine months he has been living near the sea in a shabby sort of a granny flat incongruously attached to a Victorian castle. You can’t say he has settled there. He speaks to almost nobody and hasn’t got round to unpacking his boxes of books and other belongings. His wife is dead, alive only in his thoughts. Suicide is not long absent from his mind. Then he is visited on a foul, wet, stormy night by two young policemen, Wilson and O’Casey. They are working on a case Tom worked on years ago, and their boss, Tom’s old boss, Fleming, has directed them to him. O’Casey says they know Tom had a lot to do with the priests back in the Sixties. “O not the fecking priests,” Tom says. He turns away, though on account of the foulness of the night, he puts them up and makes the three of them toasted cheese – “Welsh Rabbits”. In the morning they have gone, and Tom is left with dark, sad and angry memories and thoughts of death. It will take time for the seed Barry has deftly planted to burgeon. Meanwhile, cherish the details of Tom’s disturbed days and nights.

He replays over and over again his love for his dead wife June; there are lovely scenes of what was still then called courtship. But both were damaged people, damaged in childhood, in the institutions to which they were condemned, damaged by the priests and nuns who should have been their shepherds. There were memories which could not be blotted out, no matter how they angrily strove.

Sebastian Barry PIC: Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images

The case Wilson and O’Casey are pursuing, Tom’s old case, was of this sort. Tom was sure, had evidence, of the priest’s guilt. His superiors shut it down, handed it over to the Archbishop McQuaid, and no more was heard of it. McQuaid was the all-powerful real-life Primate of Ireland. He appears as a character in John Banville’s novel Snow and features prominently and reprehensibly in Fintan O’Toole’s Memoir of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves. So that indeed was how it was then. But Tom cannot escape the past and nor could June. One way or another his family was destroyed.

The novel gathers pace, but still demands, deserves and indeed requires slow, attentive reading if its full richness of character, place, time and memory is to be appreciated. Tom’s life, where love is its own reward but never enough to conquer all, is presented to the reader in evocative words and pictures. The novel is his life story, also perhaps, though without any pretentiousness, the story of Ireland's journey from darkness to light. The end is, arguably, improbable, even melodramatic; yet seems necessary as an act of justice.

There is fine writing here – fine writing , one may even say, of the sort which one sometimes rightly distrusts in novels; it can so easily become self-indulgent and ornamental, a peacock display, distracting from the matter, the how it is done seeming to matters more than what is being done. A writer of Barry’s gifts walks this tightrope. He keeps his balance beautifully, though. He is sometimes leisurely and may seem at risk of being self-indulgent. There’s a longish scene early on in which Tom goes to the local store, suddenly determined to give his shabby little flat a thorough cleaning. It’s amusing, lightly written, may even have you wondering why it’s there, yet you come to see it’s necessary. You have to listen for the tune echoing beyond his words. There is always music in the background of his writing.

Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry, Faber & Faber, 261pp, £18.99

Book review: Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry