Sebastian Barry is one of those writers where I think of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where Tim the Enchanter is trying to describe why the rabbit is dangerous, and he sort of gestures and splutters for a bit before waving at the thing and exclaiming, "Look at the bones!" Yes. Exactly.

I genuinely have no idea what happened in this book, or if anything that the point of view character (a retired Garda detective living on the Irish coast in the 1990s) said happened actually happened. I have a reasonable suspicion that the entire contents of this book was in fact a dream. Certainly, some of it was. Time and characters and events slip and change as the character is so caught in the past that he can't notice them now. I keep sorting through it in my memory, and can't quite work it out. There might be ghosts. It's hard to tell. Which is the point.

Rather, the point is exploring a mind so warped by a lifetime of trauma that nothing's left besides shattered pieces of a funhouse mirror reflecting back on themselves. The book deals heavily with the sexual violence inflicted on children by the Catholic church, and how the after effects can be grimly inescapable. The protagonist is both victim of the orphanages and an attempted saviour of other victims on one hand, and a perpetuator of further violence through the institutions (mainly the British Army and the Irish Garda) propping up the people that hurt him and everyone he loved. Now, in his old age, when it's a time of reckoning, he's too broken to put any of it together.

The prose is gorgeous (and definetely value added by getting the audiobook with an Irish narrator), but inescapably sad. It's often the kind of book that doesn't work for me because I close the book and go, "Well. That was depressing." In this case, there's enough cracks where the light gets in, and so much gentleness that it really worked, and I might reread it at some point.