Offr’s Reviews > Old God's Time > Status Update

Things happened to people, and some people were required to lift great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed, and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure. Road Runner, Bugs Bunny - crushed, yet recomposed. Never the smell of death in a cartoon.

It was no longer possible to be a citizen of grief, his passport to grief was cancelled, he couldn't enter there.

The Irish people. Poor stragglers stuck on the edge of Europe. Took a wrong turn on some ancient landscape. Could go no further and could not go back.

He wore a cardigan so threadbare he might have invited a spider to have it for its web. He wore wellington boots as if in hom age to Mr McGregor. The rather scowling face was lined, creased, a roadmap someone had scrunched up and sat on. It truly seemed an incongruous change from the dapper creature he had spoken to in Dalkey, and who had driven him home.

As they grew, himself and June passed all the stations of parenthood. [...] Those twenty years or so when the whole view, the only view, from the slit of your tank window, as a person might say, was their doings.

Perhaps they were on cursing terms now, old mates, per haps not. That was a big word, though, egregious, that was a word found only in books. So there was a mateyness in the cursing and a compliment in the use of the word. May be. Maybe was a good word to keep near Wilson.

A plethora of disagreeable futures.

When the thing with the priests had boiled up over them, burning their hands, scalding their faces, Billy had had McQuaid's number. They never even met the old bastard. It was just his word was everywhere, ran everywhere, through everywhere, like rat runs in an old barn.

He was the orphan of his former happiness.