Boyne carefully examines Father Odran’s predicament. While
as a young man, he was brought up by his widowed mother to believe he had a
vocation, he admits that this calling suited him nonetheless. He was brought up
in the last generation to regard the priesthood as a respected career, and in
the early 1980s, on a crowded train, the young priest resents the fawning attention
given him, constantly, by all whom he meets. Wishing for everyone to leave him
alone, he wonders “how a small twist of white plastic could inspire so much
devotion.” He remembers, as always in public, that he wears his clerical garb.
He chats with a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, who reminds him not to
resent those who pay him respect. “And one day that might change. And then
there will be no more food for your friends. And you will all go hungry.” This
moment will come two decades later, after the reports on clerical abuse and
state cover-ups will enrage many Irish men and women. How one priest shifted
from the moments of praise to the years of contempt creates a fluent narrative,
through moral heft and measured judgments. While it wobbles through digressions, the central character holds one's interest.
Terrified of difference, seeking conformity, a few
idealistic or resigned young men entered the seminary. Some found themselves
pressured, as in Tom’s case, to remain there despite their unfit nature for the
priesthood. Boyne illustrates the demands placed on those channeled into the
clerical system, and the indifference with which many were treated by their
superiors in the hierarchy. The archbishop responds to Father Odran’s
question in 2007 about Tom’s guilt in the crimes for which he is accused: “you
can go back to your precious school and teach the little bastards about
respecting the church.”
Soon, however, the Archbishop is disgraced for his own role
in the abuse scandal, as he moved priests such as Tom about from parish to
parish for decades, to evade accounting for his sins. At his classmate’s trial, Father Odran notes
the prevalence of black in the courtroom. He and the judge share “the pigment
of power” in their garb; Tom appears in layman’s attire. His classmate
reflects: “Of course the shades in my profession changed as one advanced
through the ranks, from black to scarlet to white; darkness, blood, and a cleansing
at the very top.” Boyne’s way with a phrase works well here, and the ease with
which the author intersperses an occasional analogy or image into the priest’s
first-person narration convinces the reader of the self-awareness of Father
Odran about his own difficulties with his role.
While a backstory placing Odran as a seminarian during his
last terms of study in Rome, serving as a papal assistant in the Vatican
chambers in 1978, the year of the three popes, remains a somewhat melodramatic
if clever device engineered to account for his subsequent lack of rank in the
Irish power structure, it does feature a sympathetic portrait of the Patriarch
of Venice. Cardinal Luciani treats Odran kindly. This thoughtful man reigned
for a month as Pope John Paul I. His predecessor, Paul VI, ends his only
conversation with the seminarian by asking the unanswered query: “What will we
do with Ireland?”
The answer comes after more popes, as the Vatican’s
corruption reveals the Church’s inability to justify its control, given
clerical misdeeds and a culture of protecting its own against the law and the
laity. Father Odran hears Tom’s plea of
not guilty and feels a “darkness stirring” about his own fault, “for I had seen
things and I had suspected things and I had turned away from things and I had
done nothing.” Again, the direct style Boyne uses to convey his protagonist’s
epiphany keeps the reader listening to Father Odran, but also able to distance
an ethical reaction to his self-realization as it unfolds, after he has suppressed
it for decades, from the seminary on. He struggles with how to treat Tom: “If I
cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come
to an end, what kind of a priest am I anyway? What kind of man?” Throughout the
narrative, Father Odran strives for decency, but he appears to have done so too
quietly, as he has been spared the torments of some of his sexually frustrated
or temperamentally warped colleagues, for the most part. Yet, he suffers, as
this novel shows.
The guilt Father Odran finally articulates eludes facile
resolution. Boyne leaves him at the end of this novel lamenting the current
state of his homeland. In 2013, at fifty-eight, Father Odran speaks perhaps for
his author and for many Irish who watch as European bankers intervene to impose
austerity measures. Neither politicians nor priests command respect any more.
Ireland has become “a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, pedophiles,
and incompetents.” Among them, Father Odran finds himself despised, as a
survivor of clerical abuse hisses “pedophile” at him, not the only time in this
narrative.
Boyne’s story is recommended, along with Kevin Holohan’s
satirical 2011 take on this serious subject, The Brothers’ Lot, as a depiction of the institutional breakdown
of a pillar of Irish society. The fall of the Church from grace has received
belated scrutiny by journalists and historians.
But for fictional treatments, which allow us to enter the minds of those
who entered the ranks of the clergy under the pressure or cajoling of mothers
once not long ago, A History of
Loneliness fulfills a need for a novel on this timely, sad, subject.
This appeared in altered and shorter form on Spectrum Culture 2-5-15. See also Amazon US 2-2-15.
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