davidclensy.com

Sebastian Barry spoke captivatingly in Bath, during his visit to promote his new novel Old God’s Time. The book deals movingly with the issues around historic child sex abuse in the Catholic church in Ireland, which Barry described as “not like a couple of rotten apples”, adding “it was more like a barrel of fermented rotten apples”.

Barry said his period as Laureate for Irish Fiction (2019–2021) stopped him “thinking about himself” as a writer, and gave him a sense of “a public role”, which ultimately opened the door to him taking on this enormously challenging subject matter.

Comparing the process of novel writing to salmon fishing, he said: “I have no idea what the book is going to be at the beginning. I know I’m standing very close to something. I’m hoping it’s there. I don’t want to scare it.

“Just as my grandfather, who was a painter, was painting in his studio, he used to put the old hub caps of cars out in the garden with water in them so the birds would come. He said to me, as a boy, ‘don’t make a sudden movement, or else the birds will go out of the garden and I’ll never get them back in where I’m sketching them’. I’ve learnt to be very still when writing a book too – so the birds don’t fly out of the garden.”