Old God's Time

Interwoven with the lasting impact of trauma, the systemic violence in institutions is a central theme of the novel. The novel shows how institutions’ power structures can enable violence. For one, they can protect the personal actions of individuals; for instance, the doctor and the nuns all affect obliviousness about the cause of June’s injuries. The novel highlights the absurdity of this through the doctor’s implausible suggestion that perhaps she sat on a stick. Second, they can actively promote a culture of violence: The orphanages institutionalized abusive treatment of the children, including forced labor, poor conditions, and punitive force. The brothers justify their discrimination toward Tom for being a sex worker’s child through an interpretation of Christianity that serves their ideas, which shows how this institutional violence is often excused by the perpetrators. Other institutions, including the police and the armed forces, explicitly incorporate violence into their ideology with varying degrees of formality. In the army, Tom’s job is to kill Malayans trying to access food, in case they are rebels; in the police, he frequently used violence to extract information or as retribution.

Both the police and the church are organizations that exist to protect people. However, the novel shows that society’s need for structure—including creating and upholding laws, and offering social support to the vulnerable, such as orphans—leads to the creation of institutions whose power can easily be abused. The novel highlights the irony of this through the dichotomy of Tom’s sense of his role within the community: He thinks about his role as a police officer as being “to protect, but also […] to harass, to arrest” (85).

These institutions’ abuse of their power is interwoven with broader social and cultural structures. The church is a building block of Irish society and it has vast power and status; as a result, even the police defer to the church and hand over evidence about child abuse to the archbishop to deal with internally, resulting in it disappearing. The police cannot interfere with church-run institutions and they even return any runaways to the church, even though Tom has personal experience with the widespread abuse that takes place within those institutions. The police also cannot interfere with domestic violence as a man is seen as the head of his household—so, while police will check a woman or child is still breathing, they won’t cross the threshold. So, institutions at all levels, including the church, the police, and the patriarchal household, are built around hierarchies of power that feed into each other and enable the perpetuation of systemic violence.

The novel shows that even colonization is the practice of systemic violence on a large scale. It portrays three regions that have experienced violent colonization: Malaya, the United States, and Ireland. In the United States, Tom notices the difference in wealth between the non-Native and Native American communities, which highlights the long-lasting effects of violent colonization. In Ireland, the graphic description of the aftermath of the car bomb attack illustrates the long-lasting wounds following a complex history of colonization. Finally, Tom notes that the British army is in Malaya to try and tidy up the mess they made before they leave the country. In this way, the novel shows that systemic violence creates a foundation of violence that is self-perpetuating, and it even infiltrates attempts to dismantle it when using the same institutions.

The novel explores the complex ways in which Tom’s mind experiences reality, closely connecting this to the lasting impact of trauma. The nonlinear narrative gradually reveals information that was avoided or presented differently earlier, recreating the confusion Tom experiences as his perception of reality keeps shifting. For example, he has genuinely forgotten that he investigated Matthews’s murder; the narrative reveals this fact to Tom and the reader at the same time. Occasionally, Tom struggles to find words or forgets details, which are symptoms associated with old age and the changing lifestyle of retirement, but also with dementia. The exact causes of Tom’s confusion remain ambiguous, reflecting the novel’s point that the complexities of the mind cannot be fully understood or pinned down.

Tom’s mind is also impacted by the trauma he has experienced, so it creates different realities for him. It suppresses his memories of June, Winnie, and Joe’s deaths in order to protect him from the pain. His mind also invents fantastical scenarios that help him to process events, such as June becoming a rat-like creature and crawling onto his back, which reflects his support of even her darkest moments. These scenarios help him to find peace, such as the calm presence of the unicorn that he sees as he plays out rescuing Jesse.

The novel remains ambiguous about the events Tom experiences and around his memories. For example, some inconsistencies within his stories are never resolved: He remembers running up the mountain with June in a rat-like form under his coat, but this memory is never corrected with an alternative, more realistic version. Also, the apparent ghosts that Tom interacts with are not isolated apparitions but are woven into the broader world. For instance, Winnie bought Tom his kettle; he has a spare mattress for her, which is real to O’Casey and Wilson, but he gives her sugar, which he can’t give to them as he doesn’t have any. This ambiguity creates a mythical, fantastical tone around the events of the novel; since these experiences are real to Tom’s mind, they are reality. In the final section of the book, Tom describes how “he was less confused even if he was confused” as he has a new understanding about things that “simply manifest” (225). In the novel, metaphor and story can contain non-literal realities, and these give Tom’s mind clarity even while they confuse his relationship with the world around him.

Throughout the novel, these fantastical elements are juxtaposed with scientific language, in particular the language of forensic science and particle physics. This highlights a gulf between Tom’s subjective experience of reality and an objective reality. However, the novel also questions the extent to which an objective, external reality can be known. Forensic evidence is used to tell human stories; it cannot tell a complete story, and it is used by humans within their institutional and societal confines: Tom’s blood sample does not connect him to Matthews’s murder, but he was, in fact, there, and this won’t prevent Wilson pursuing it at Byrne’s request. Tom imbues atoms with meaning, too; he wants to split the priests’ atoms after they’re dead so they can’t be part of anything else, and he connects them with a spiritual idea of being part of a bigger universe “whose atoms he had merely borrowed” (214). Even when the novel creates narrative distance, shifting from Tom’s point of view into omniscient narration, it uses a description of neutrinos to pose questions about God and Tom’s soul; it interweaves scientific terminology with religion and myth, placing science into the context of storytelling. In this way, it shows that it is impossible to separate the human mind’s perception of reality from an objective external reality; the mind is its own reality.