Novel tackles Catholic sex-abuse scandal
In a telling anecdote that arrives in the first pages of A History of Loneliness, John Boyne's corrosive new novel about the sexual-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Ireland, Father Odran Yates recalls a startling change in his nephew, Aidan, in his teens.
Once cheerful and extroverted, Aidan inexplicably becomes distant and angry. Later, at a family gathering, a semi-drunk Aidan confronts his priestly uncle and demands, mysteriously, "Do you never wish you could go back and live it all over again? Do everything differently? Be a normal man instead of what you are?" Father Yates denies it, answering that at the center of his life in the church has been "a feeling of great contentment."
An ominous exchange, more so to the reader than to Father Yates, who, at that early stage of this grim tale of slow-dawning horror followed by self-recrimination, has managed to keep his eyes wide shut. Oh, sure, the occasional frisson of unease has troubled him while observing certain interactions between priests and the young (including his own youthful interview with one Father Haughton, who turns a chat about Odran's encounter with a girl into something far creepier). But for Father Yates, a belief in the rectitude and moral authority of the Church and all its servants is the foundation of his contentment.
When that foundation begins to crumble, it does so implacably and with accelerating speed. Father Yates is uprooted from his long-held, sheltered position at a Catholic college in Dublin to serve a parish whose often-transferred priest — an old friend of his from seminary, curiously nicknamed "Satan" — is leaving under what the archbishop calls "delicate" circumstances, "not for public consumption."
As the years go by in his new position, Father Yates comes to recognize that much of his "contentment" has been based on a kind of magical thinking with regard to sex abuse in the Church: If you work at it hard enough, almost anything seen can be unseen. But when that strategy becomes untenable, as it does when sex scandals in the Church graduate from closed-door rumors to hot debates in the news media, Father Yates is forced to confront all that he's seen and unseen, and to shoulder the yoke of what he comes to call "the guilt, the guilt, the guilt."
The narrative structure of The History of Loneliness is deftly complex, moving back and forth between eras in which attitudes toward sexual misconduct by priests keep evolving. (Once entreated by every other passenger on public buses to take their seats, Father Yates finds himself, in later years, suffering the sting of public ostracism because of his Roman collar.)
Another evolution tracked in the novel is the public's (and the Church's) attitude toward homosexuality, which Boyne carefully delineates so as not to confuse it with pedophilia — a distinction that bears underlining today as the tales of woe, many involving priests and the altar boys under their direction, continue to reach an angry public.
Boyne, author of the best-selling young-adult novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, sheds light, not heat, on the subject, which is more than can be said for many who continue to use the scandals for their own theological and political agendas. Boyne gets it right.
A History of Loneliness
By John Boyne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 337 pp.
3 1/2 stars out of four