IRELAND
Toronto Star
By: Elizabeth Warkentin Special to the Star, Published on Sat Feb 21 2015
John Boyne’s ninth novel for adults, A History of Loneliness, is an achingly sad story of a kind-hearted but cowardly priest who prefers to bury his head in the sand than confront difficult situations.
Boyne waited years to write this brave, personal, yet ultimately Irish story. “The Catholic priesthood blighted my youth and the youth of people like me,” he says of growing up gay in Catholic Ireland. In a piece for The Guardian he recalls being groped in class by his teachers and being told by these same men that he was sick, mentally disordered and in need of electroshock therapy. The author admits that like his protagonist, Dubliner Odran Yates, perhaps the reason he did not write about his experiences sooner was that he was ashamed. “I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life,” says Odran Yates in the opening sentence of the novel.
Odran enters Clonliffe Seminary in 1972, after his mother informs him that he has a vocation. The boy is not sure that the priesthood is indeed his destiny, but the family having suffered a double tragedy some years earlier, Odran wishes to please his mother. Besides, at 17, he has no better ideas. Full of optimism for his future, Odran is a good student, keen to please his teachers and make friends. As is so often the case in young men’s friendships, his “cellmate,” Tom Cardle, becomes his default BFF, by simple virtue of their bunking together. Odran is curiously loyal to Tom throughout their teen and adult years, though the two have nothing in common besides a shared past.
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