Old God's Time

June is Tom’s wife. His deep and enduring love for her gives his life meaning, despite the abuse they both experienced as children. Tom’s fond recollections of their courtship and descriptions of her physical beauty are conventions typical of a romance novel, but this is contrasted with her traumatic past.

Though the novel only shows June through Tom’s eyes, she is nevertheless a rounded character who is detailed and complex. Tom describes her stylish, hippy denim and her anti-war stance, showing the broader cultural movement she embraced. She loved dancing; her physicality remains vivid to Tom, who thinks of the heat of her body, reflecting her spirit for life. He admires her extraordinary strength in the wake of her abusive childhood, and he recalls the minutiae of the home she shaped for him and their children, reflecting the value she placed in family, and offering clues about her personality.

This portrayal of June juxtaposes with the violence of her premeditated death by suicide: She goes into Dublin wearing her summer dress, crosses town to buy gas, finds a quiet spot in the park, and leaves a note. Her death by suicide symbolizes her rejection of the abuse she experienced as a child. It suggests self-hatred in its self-destructive nature, but it also has connotations of protest, particularly given June’s stance on the Vietnam War in her youth. Tom’s memories of June are suffused with her light and heat, which symbolize June’s strength and spirit. By self-immolating, she allows light and heat to consume her, which illustrates the complexity of her character—she dies by suicide, yet she embodies love and vigor.

Winnie and Joe are Tom and June’s children. Tom initially speaks of them as if they were alive in the present, but he later acknowledges that they are dead. Their deaths represent one of the central mysteries in the plot; they aren’t explained until the penultimate chapter, as Tom finds it too hard to think about them.

Winnie and Joe’s characters are rounded through personal details, like Winnie’s unique sense of style in her yellow Marilyn Monroe coat and Joe’s childhood fear of witches. Like June, they encapsulate both hope for the human spirit and the impossibility of escaping violence. Despite Winnie’s grief and struggles with addiction, she tenaciously pursues a legal career, and Tom feels that she has bettered him through her dialogue about feminism. Joe moves to the United States, needing to escape the intergenerational trauma of his homeland; he finds community and meaning as a doctor there, serving on a Native American reservation. Both these characters die young. The novel balances the tragedy of their deaths against the meaning they found in life and the loving relationships they each had with Tom.

Billy Drury was Tom’s long-term partner in the police; they were an investigative team. Billy fills an archetypal role in a mystery or crime genre novel of the cop buddy. Billy and Tom have a close friendship, too: Billy was there when Tom first met June, and Tom fondly remembers them teasing him about his taste in music. Through his dedication to his police work and his warmth to Tom, Billy is the supporting character to the hero—he is a likeable and morally good character.

Billy is known for his meticulous process and record-keeping; however, there are no blood samples on record for Matthews’s murder, and Byrne’s witness statement does not match Billy’s account. This shows that Billy covered up Tom and June’s crime. Since Matthews and Byrne are antagonists—with the novel explicitly describing their cruelty and violence toward children—the novel frames Billy’s actions as being justified. However, the renewed attempts to uncover the truth in order to convict Byrne show the flaw in this approach to justice: Allowing justice to be determined by an individual’s conscience is what created the conditions in which the priests were not held accountable.

Billy’s death in a random act of violence when he was off duty adds to the atmosphere of underlying danger that runs through the novel, which it associates with Irish life in the 20th century. It also highlights Tom’s present isolation: Everyone he loved is dead.

Mr. Tomelty is Tom’s landlord. He is a liminal character who hovers between different realities: Although he is rich enough to own a mansion that looks like a castle and the apartments, he dresses in old clothes as he spends most of his time gardening. One of Tom’s interactions with him is either not real or is not with the present version of Tomelty since he looks younger, dresses differently, and gives Tom a lift in a car that he later reveals he sold years ago. Through this, the novel shows that the past and present are interwoven.

Mrs. Tomelty represents a comforting spiritual presence. She is gentle and welcoming; also, she wears shadowy clothes and has a unicorn standing quietly by. Before Tom knows that Mrs. Tomelty is dead, she expresses gratitude for his presence, especially with the two young children living in the building; this puts Tom in the role of a protector. However, she seems to give Tom new information, telling him about the many varieties of tea roses that he didn’t know existed. The novel never clarifies whether this interaction is only in Tom’s mind or whether she is a real ghost.

Miss McNulty and her young son Jesse are Tom’s neighbors and Tomelty’s other tenants. These characters encapsulate the structural failure of Irish society and police to deal with domestic violence: The authorities do not pick up on her husband’s abuse of their daughter, and even when the little girl dies of her injuries, they take his word that he is innocent. Further, they are unable to offer protection to Miss McNulty and Jesse until her husband commits an actual crime against them.

The novel connects societal microaggressions with deeper violence: Miss McNulty corrects Tom that she is an actor rather than an actress, and Tomelty’s assumption that she is engaging in sex work is revealed to be incorrect since her older male visitor is her father. Through these details, the novel shows that a sexist society creates the conditions for her vulnerable situation.

The cellist is only described by his name a few times in the novel, which gives him an otherworldly quality. His music forms part of the atmospheric setting of the novel as Tom hears it through the walls. The cellist is both a plot device and a symbol: His gun enables Tom to live out his desire to protect a child, and it signifies a fantastical use of violence purely for good. This action may be imagined, drawing into question whether an ideal of pure or moral violence is an illusion.

These priests are the primary antagonists of the novel. They represent individual evil and also systemic corruption and violence. They are in positions of power and care over children, and they use this to carry out repeated sexual abuse with the complicity of other authorities, such as the doctor who treats June and the police commissioner who hands over the evidence to the archbishop to tackle internally. They are emblematic of the novel’s socio-historic context of institutional child abuse in Ireland.

They are flat characters who are defined by their actions, which places them beyond further contextualization. Tom describes Matthews as a “filthy dark evil cold murderous vile creature with a penis for a soul” (215). The lack of punctuation and the list of adjectives communicate Tom’s horror and hatred at Matthews’s actions. This is juxtaposed against their office of “Priests! […] peddling piety and goodness!” (216); the exclamation points express Tom’s incredulity and anger at their horrific actions and their venerable professions. Their position of responsibility both enabled their actions and made them all the more shocking.

Wilson and O’Casey are two officers from Tom’s former police division. Their arrival in Tom’s flat brings his past into the present, setting off the chain of events that will force him to confront the truth. Narratively, they mirror Tom and Billy, pursuing the case that they were forced to drop. Tom envies and admires their companionship. This shows the way he felt about Billy and how he still misses the friendship they had. It also presents the importance of small human connections to survive the large-scale horrors of the world. Tom believes that Wilson and O’Casey would sacrifice him to get their conviction, and he wholeheartedly supports this, which shows the strength of Tom’s desire for justice against the priests.