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Something is happening to literary time. In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers appointments with the past (Time Travel for Beginners, Jaclyn Moriarty), and a young woman who’s genetically untethered from linear life (Audrey Niffenegger’s long-awaited sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, out in October). And these are just the latest books to meddle with the fourth dimension. There are dozens: from Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, to Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. Time is losing the plot – or perhaps it’s the other way around.
I have an armchair theory about all this counterfactual longing: the lure of the do-over. The present feels like a corrupted timeline. If only we could find the glitch.
But even realist novels are messing with the clock. Irish author Donal Ryan’s Where Are the Kings is a study in grief-time: the ways loss distorts the ordinary passage of hours. Days stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear. Memories gather their own temporal weight. Grief becomes a planet with its own cruel, ruminative gravity.
In his memory, Jack is forever pursuing his suicidal mother to the lake, reliving her last minutes. She is driving her rusty, backfiring Fiat; he is following behind on his pushbike, forcing his body up hill after hill. His muscles are screaming, his lungs are screaming, he is screaming. And he is too late. We will never learn what prompted Jack to follow his mam – only that he knew, in that terrible, lucid way kids know. There is a version of Jack that will always be pedalling; a version of her that might still be saved.
Jack is 12 when we meet him, and in the care of his mother’s people: two stoic grandparents, a trio of blustering uncles and an unhelpfully gorgeous aunt. Jack’s father, Tomáš, has been institutionalised and feels as lost to the boy as his drowned mother. Twice now, Jack has seen a parent break – witnessed something vast and irreversible. He remembers the soundless way his mother cried; how his father clutched at her coffin. His desperate hands.
Jack is poised on the edge of adolescence: smart (“high eye queues”, as his grandad brags), but still at that threshold where perception outpaces understanding. He senses a family injury: “something complicated and invisible, some ancient strife from the time before he existed”. But he can’t quite grasp the shape of the wound, or how it festers in and around him. The grownups are tight-lipped. There’s a great deal they’ve learned to forget. Jack’s mother is already receding into hush and euphemism: “They hardly ever talk about Mam directly. They allude. They are oblique.”
But the family do talk. And their affable chatter is the great pleasure of this novel, particularly Jack’s uncles, Theo and Haulie, a pair of existentially questing mechanics. They ponder the great questions of the universe, retell the great myths: “Liquorice? No, it’s Icarus you thick bastard, the fella whose father made him wings and stuck them on him and he flew too high and bollixed himself up.” And then there’s Jack’s nana and her blasphemous wisdom. On Adam, the world’s first disappointing husband: “he couldn’t keep his house in order, the dopey prick. Set us all on the path to ruin.”
Add in some incestuous lust, a dead deer, contested ashes, feckless priests and a flatulent roommate, and there are the makings here of a family farce: comic or tragic (or both). In another novel, some wild reckoning would be brewing (think of the final wheeling chapters of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting). But Ryan has never been a grand vaudevillian, or a cathartic trauma plotter. Where Are the Kings is a gentle novel of ungentle things – a reminder that “things don’t stop being beautiful because ugly things happen”. If Ryan’s fiction has a moral heartbeat, this might be it.
There’s a hint or two that Ryan’s eighth novel inhabits the same unhurried world as 2020’s Strange Flowers, his tender-hearted tale of rural life, set in the fictional village of Knockagowny. Like Niall Williams, Ryan seems to be mapping an imagined Ireland, family by family.
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Time moves strangely in this quiet corner of Tipperary, beyond the attenuation of grief: gossip is fleet; politics are sluggish. We gather our bearings from faded band T-shirts, songs on the radio and the late appearance of a brickish mobile phone. It seems to be the late 1990s, but that date feels almost incidental. It could be the 1980s. It could almost be the 1950s. In Theo and Haulie’s garage, time warps even further: “A good while ago could mean a month ago or it could be right back in history,” Ryan writes. “Time stops being linear and it susurrates and syncopates.” Jack imagines the workshop as a kind of wormhole. Might this be his way off the grief-planet: learning to put things back together? It can’t be that simple. And yet it is.
What are we to make of all this slippage and stretching? Ryan gives us a clue in his section headings: Tempus Edax. Tempus Fugit. Tempus Imperator. Time devours. Time flies. Time rules supreme. These phrases belong to the tradition of memento mori: reminders of mortality’s cruel, beautiful, stupid, inescapable truth. Or as Jack puts it: “There’s nothing to be done then, it seems, except live.”
