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	Raking over Old Stuff and Stirring Things up Again By Greg Burliuk The Whig-Standard April 3, 2010 http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2518941 Linden MacIntyre doesn't claim to be psychic, but it does seem so. His latest novel,The Bishop's Man,is about a priest whose job in the past has been to clean up messes, often involving sexual abuse, in the diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Imagine his surprise when the day before the publication of his book, the bishop of Antigonish, Raymond Lahey, announced a $15-million settlement to the victims of sexual abuse in that diocese. "I had been uneasy that my book would be considered raking over old stuff and stirring things up again, but with the bishop's announcement, I thought he's did it for me. I'll go home and have a drink," says MacIntyre, who many Canadians are familiar with from his work on the CBC-TV showThe Fifth Estate. "And then a month later, the bishop is arrested on charges of kiddie porn. All the lines between fiction and fact and journalism had become blurred." The Bishop's Manwent on to win Canada's most coveted literary award, the Giller Prize, last November. MacIntyre will be one of the authors appearing at Writers and Friends, the annual benefit for Horizons of Friendship, the charity that initiates self-help projects in Latin America and Mexico. The Bishop's Manis a sequel of sorts, to MacIntyre's first novel,The Long Stretch,which was published in 1999 and has many of the same characters, although in lesser or larger roles. His main character inThe Bishop's Man,Father MacAskill, is only incidental inThe Long Stretch. "In the larger context, it's about the awful baggage we carried with us from the last century and about the hundreds of millions of people who were killed and warped through two wars," says MacIntyre. "The effects seeped into the smallest of communities. That's the big backdrop for the story. It's about the awful baggage we've carried with us." The protagonist is a fixer, sent by his bishop to smooth things over when a scandal involving a local priest breaks out. It could be impregnating a local woman, MacAskill's first case. More often, however, it's a sexual abuse case, where the offender is quietly sent off to a treatment facility or even another province. Now MacAskill's been assigned to a small parish near where he grew up and faces a personal crisis, feeling guilty for what he has done and what the future holds for him. MacIntyre writes with such assurance about the inner life of a priest that I'm sure he was one once himself. Not so, he says. "But when I grew up, everyone tended to go to church and behave accordingly. "I was tempted by the Augustinians, who had a monastery near us, which was so serene. But my Irish mother would always sit me down and grill me about my motivation. The fact is I came from a small town where there weren't many people my own age and the Augustinians had a lot of people my age." For the author, the hardest thing about writing the book was simply deciding to go forward in telling it from a priest's point of view. "It was getting the confidence to speak from the interior perspective of a priest," says Mac-Intyre. "I had to assume the priest's fundamental humanity and that I could look at him as a troubled man who had made moral compromises. Once I crossed that line, I knew I could learn more about the church." Just to make sure, MacIntyre twice during the writing process sent his manuscript to a former priest who was in the clergy for 25 years. Both times, he was reassured he was on the right track. MacIntyre wasn't prepared to win the Giller. "I wasn't surprised to be on the long list of nominees, but I was surprised to be on the short list, when someone like Margaret Atwood wasn't," he says. "I felt like an interloper winning it." He is now working on the third volume of the trilogy about the same characters. "I'm about half way through the first draft," says MacIntyre, noting that he still likes working as a journalist on theFifth Estate. Contact: gburliuk@thewhig.com
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