Old God's Time

In this first section, the novel establishes features of the setting that are important in creating atmosphere and also introduces many of the novel’s themes. In his retirement, Tom lives in a lean-to apartment that is added on to a fake Victorian castle with mock Gothic architecture. This represents the vulnerability of his present, which is built onto a reworking or a faking of the past; it foreshadows the secrets he keeps. The building also ties the novel into the traditional mystery or detective genre, in which Gothic architecture is a common feature of the setting. However, its superficiality hints that Old God’s Time offers twists on this traditional genre. The book’s mysteries relate to Subjective Reality Versus Objective Reality rather than to unsolved crimes.

Another element of the setting—the sea outside Tom’s window—is a reflection of the Systemic Violence in Institutions. Tom notes that “Policing always had its salt of danger, like the sea itself” (5). By comparing police work to the ocean, Tom introduces the idea that institutions’ power gives them the potential to do harm as well as good. It also creates an ever-present backdrop of danger, drawing attention to the proximity and threat of the sea, and it also foreshadows Tom’s final swim.

These beginning chapters also establish the narrative tone, which develops the theme of Tom’s subjective reality as opposed to an objective reality. The third-person narration is primarily from Tom’s point of view. The novel mirrors some of his dialogue speech patterns in the narration to indicate that the narration is his thought train. For example, Tom repeats the phrase “I don’t mind, I don’t mind” in dialogue (4), and the narration then repeats another phrase—“it was not to be, it was not to be” (8)—creating a similar tone. This technique is central as it builds suspense and mystery, revealing new information as Tom remembers it and offering an insight into Tom’s mind.

Tom is an unreliable narrator, and this adds to the suspense and mystery in the novel since his perception of reality is not constant; he first introduces some information as fact, and then reveals contradictory information later. For instance, Tom first thinks about Winnie and Joe as if they are alive, and then later he wonders why he struggles to acknowledge that they are in fact dead. He simultaneously wonders why he struggles to discuss his aversion to the case reports about the priests, giving a clue that the tricks his mind plays relate to this topic in some way. Tom’s mind deliberately withholds information: After the officers’ visit, “he could not ‘think of nothing’, which was his whole ambition” (26). The obscure or contradictory parts of the narration recreate his disorientation and build mystery around both Tom’s mind and the reality of the past.

The novel enhances its mysterious, unpredictable aspect by reversing this pattern at times; for example, when Tom can’t find his toothbrush in the morning, he attributes it to his mental state. However, the novel later reveals that in fact Wilson and O’Casey took the toothbrush. These details ensure that inconsistencies in the narration cannot be automatically assumed to be a product of Tom’s false perceptions, creating an unsettled world in which fact and fiction blur. This ambiguity is important in imbuing the later fantastical elements of the novel with symbolic meaning.

While the third-person narration is usually close to Tom’s point of view, the narration switches to an omniscient narrator at times, which comments directly on the narrative and creates narrative distance. For example, when Tom is asleep, the omniscient narrator comments: “[O]f course his story continued as he lay there sleeping, and his brain continued to tell a story disconnected from his waking self” (45). This detached narrator reveals Tom’s unreliability as a narrator, commenting on the gulf between an objective reality and Tom’s perception of it. This omniscient narrator also uses poetic imagery and metaphor to explore ideas: for example, “did it really speak of the unimportance of Tom Kettle that he was not really there to a neutrino? Maybe God saw him?” (46). This large-scale imagery, dealing with the universe and God, highlights the narrator’s omniscience but also creates a mythical atmosphere, drawing attention to the telling of Tom’s story. Thus, it emphasizes that all reality is seen through the lens of human narrative.

In The Search for Healing, Tom has isolated himself in an attempt to separate himself from his past. His wicker chair symbolizes a quiet, comfortable retirement; he loves to sit in it, and feels that “this was the whole point of […] existence—to be stationary” (2). However, his former colleagues visit and pull him out of his isolation; Tom feels that the wicker chair is “a thousand light years away now” (41). Hiding from his trauma does not truly heal it—it arrives at his doorstep. Whenever Tom opens his door, it screeches loudly against the floor, as if in protest, and this is a symbol of his pain and reluctance at confronting the outside world and his own past. Tom has been retired for nine months, a time period that he notes is like a pregnancy; this builds tension since it indicates that something momentous—a rebirth of sorts—is about to take place.