Last week, the Irish novelist Sebastian Barry quietly pocketed his fifth Booker prize nomination. He’s effusive and amused beneath a bearish exterior, and it’s easy to imagine him receiving the news with a smile and a shrug. But it’s a big deal. Old God’s Time, his beguilingly foggy, heartsore, devastating 11th novel, has arrived 18 years after his first Booker nomination.
In the two decades in between he has written about war, illness, his own family history, America. Perhaps this is the true measure of an artist: someone who can not only bottle one idea but afterwards sweep all traces of it away and repeat the alchemy over and over. It takes humility, I think – in what other field, having risen to greatness,
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