Photograph: Dani Pozo
A History of Loneliness by John Boyne review – a denunciation of the Catholic church
"Ireland is rotten. Rotten to the core. I'm sorry, but you priests destroyed it." These words are spoken by a young man who was sexually attacked in his childhood by an Irish priest, a friend of the family. They go to the heart of this novel's passionate denunciation of the role played by the Catholic church in the scandal over child abuse by the clergy. It is a study of the corrupting effects of power in an Ireland that came close to being a theocracy. Sexuality was strictly governed; contraception, abortion and divorce were forbidden; and yet the abuse of children went unpunished and was deliberately concealed by the church hierarchy for fear of damage to the institution. It is this cover-up, this shifting from parish to parish of offending priests, this determination to put the good name of the church – and its resources – above the sufferings of children that has caused such shock, shame and anger in Ireland, and many other parts of the world.
The central character in A History of Loneliness is Odran Yates, a Dubliner who enters a seminary at the age of 17. He believes that he has a vocation: his mother has told him so. The family has already been shattered by tragedy, and Odran doesn't know his own mind. His weakness opens a fault line that will deepen throughout the novel. He hides from himself what he doesn't want to see, and tells his own story with an apparently nonchalant fluency that omits a great deal. Boyne makes expert use of the gaps in Odran's narration. Inexorably, he proves that what Odran considers to be his own innocence may also be seen as wilful ignorance. In the seminary, Odran and Tom Cardle are "cellmates" for five years, and yet although Odran considers Tom his best friend, the two do not truly know each other. Tom will become one of those priests who stays only a year or two in a parish before being moved on, and Odran will close his eyes to the implications of this. The revelation that the altar boys in Tom's parish call him "Satan" appals, but fails to enlighten him.
This is a harsh, unsparing novel. Here is the church stripped bare of trust and affection between priests and people, with no credit given to its work for the poor and dispossessed. The portrait of Irish society is equally lacerating. Relationships are marked by coercion and physical violence, and the image of fathers destroying their children recurs. Tom has been forced into the seminary by his father, and has neither vocation nor religious faith. After challenging the priest instructing the class the teenager runs away, but is brutally punished by his father and later returned. Odran sees his friend's face: "the greenish colour around his right eye, the bruises diminishing at last; the nasty-looking cut on his lower lip. And did I mention that one of his arms was in plaster? Here was a boy who had been beaten black and blue." Biological fathers dominate their sons, while spiritual fathers rape eight-year-old boys. Bishops connive with cardinals to ensure that the message of concealment is enforced from the top down.
One section of the novel is set in Rome, and here Boyne loses his sureness of touch. Odran at the heart of the Vatican stretches credibility, but Odran privy to hidden details about the sudden death of John Paul I is a step too far, and it breaks the emotional focus and the tension of the novel. Similarly, Odran's experience of Norway (his sister marries a Norwegian) is somewhat idealised by the novel's need to create a society that is the opposite of Ireland.
St Thomas Aquinas considered "wilful ignorance" a grave sin against faith, and this is the indictment that Boyne builds against Odran, and against the priests who knew, might have known, must have known the reasons for some of their number being moved by the hierarchy "from Billy to Jack". Odran is named after a saint, the charioteer of St Patrick and first martyr of Ireland. This is surely ironic, for his namesake avoids confrontation wherever he can. The paedophiles are on trial at last, but the silent enablers of crime are also indicted. This scorching novel takes the reader to a wasteland, "a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, paedophiles and incompetents", as Odran finally admits that he has not been telling us the whole story, and that the confiding tone of his voice is not to be trusted. John Boyne writes with compelling anger about the abuses of power and the dangers of submission.
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