A Shameful History

Irish News
October 2, 2014

http://www.irishnews.com/features/a-shameful-history-1383870

John Boyne hit the best-seller lists with his 2006 novel for young adults The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. His latest, adult-oriented title concerns an Irish priest wrestling with his culpability over sexual abuse perpetrated by colleagues over decades. It's a novel the Dublin author felt compelled to write, he tells David Roy

IN JOHN Boyne's A History of Loneliness, a fundamentally decent Irish priest pays a highly personal price for ignoring the deviant activities of his fellow Catholic clergy.

When Odran Yates finds himself railroaded into 'the mother's vocation' in the wake of a family tragedy, it is the early 1970s - a time when priests are still treated with literal reverence by the wider community in Ireland.

However, even in those halcyon days, there were rumours of unspeakable abuses of power taking place in Catholic schools, churches and even in the homes of families who would never think to question a priest's motives for wanting to be alone with their vulnerable young offspring.

For his own reasons, Odran chooses to turn a blind eye to such transgressions as he pursues the calling he quickly realises he's actually quite suited to. As a gifted student, the young priest even finds himself selected to complete his studies in Rome, where he is bestowed the greater honour of serving the Pope directly - two Popes in fact.

Having missed the reform-minded Pope John Paul I's sudden expiration when a moment of madness lured him away from his post, the Irishman returns home under a cloud.

However, even as Odran begins to settle into his new role as librarian at Dublin's privileged Terenure College in the early 1980s, the real heavy weather that will cause so much turbulence in his life is already moving in: 'the Polish Pope' has assumed control of a Church becoming increasingly geared towards self-preservation at all costs.

By flitting back and forth in time from chapter to chapter, A History of Loneliness allows us to experience a rapidly evolving Ireland's changing relationship with the Church over several decades - from unquestioning deference in the 1950s right the way through to the open hostility and violence in the wake of the endless sexual abuse scandals of the early 21st century.

We are privy to Odran's thoughts on it all as he wrestles with the dawning realisation of his complicity in the Church's 'Irish problem' and its terrible impact on his own extended family.

Although John Boyne (43) never considered becoming a priest himself, the Dubliner was an altar boy who attended a Catholic school (the aforementioned Terenure College, in fact) while living in close proximity to those who had given themselves to God.

"One of my next-door neighbours was our parish priest: on the other side lived three nuns," recalls the author, who has up until now resisted writing about his own country.

Indeed, Boyne's first novel to be set in Ireland includes many details taken directly from his own childhood - one mercifully free from abuse at the hands of deviant Catholic priests. "A lot of it is set around the years I was growing up and the places I was growing up in," explains the novelist, who lives with his civil partner in Dublin. "Because these are times and places I haven't written about before, over the years I had worried that it would be a struggle. So I was a little surprised at how it was like a floodgate of memory suddenly opening.