The Nineties are recalled in Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, they are times that seem now so long ago and so different that they belong to a different age. The story described is set in a pre-electronic age, when the world seemed steady, stable.

The Nineties in the story are set against a canvas very different from the beauty of the Co Down coast and the tranquillity of a rural parish, but there is an inescapable sense that these times have gone forever, whether on the Lecale coast, or in south Co Dublin, there is no option of recovering what has been lost.

Of course, one retrojects ideas onto the past that make it happier than it might ever have been, but there is a sense that different decisions taken then may have led to a better outcome, or at least a less painful outcome.

Seven years were spent in that first parish, then there were fourteen years in between, before the seven years in the final parish.

Now, it is seven years since I left. Perhaps if there were a chance to rewind, then twenty-eight years back might give an opportunity of choosing a different path, getting things right.

Or perhaps a step back twenty-one years, and an avoidance of the Friends Reunited website and the turbulence and pain that would follow. A step back seven years might allow the rejection of the way of betrayal, a remaining faithful to vows, a decision to do the right thing instead of making the vile choice that was made.

Seven years since a daughter spoke, a marriage missed, a grandchild never seen, a family lost.

Sebastian Barry weaves an impression of a character slowly drifting from lucidity, the memories mingle, the sense of loss is pervasive.

But Barry’s character is one of the good guys, not a selfish idiot who caused untold pain to others and who has become the bad man, the sad man.

The advantage fiction has is the capacity of the writer to rewrite the script, to revise what has happened so as to give the story a different ending.

In the linear life to which humans are subject, there is no option for rewriting the past, with all its cruelty, and all its ugliness, and all its darkness, it remains there, a witness whose evidence leads always to judgment.

Seven years, fourteen year, twenty-one years, twenty-eight years, may thirty-five years bring a better story.