AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
Michael McGirr
FICTION
Crimes of the Father
TOM KENEALLY
VINTAGE, $32.99
There are a growing number of novels prepared to tell the story of paedophilia within various church communities, not least the Catholic Church. Few of them have needed to stray far from the grim facts. Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me and John Boyne’s The Long History of Loneliness are just two examples. Both these books draw the line between good and bad clergy. But they also have solid reason to call into question an entire ecclesiastical culture. They are valuable books but they don’t make comfortable reading.
Tom Keneally’s new novel, Crimes of the Father, is the same but different. One distinction is the undeniable affection Keneally has for Catholicism, evident in the moving final paragraphs of this novel. This affection can be seen in a number of places in Keneally’s work, including his memoir, Homebush Boy, one of the few kindly portrayals of the Christian Brothers in Australian Literature. At the same time, Keneally has visited clerical sexual abuse before, notably in An Angel in Australia.
Crimes of the Father is based in more recent church history. Much of it is set in 1996, an important year in the history of the awareness of sexual abuse in Australia, the year in which the Towards Healing process came into being. Here, a similar process is called In Compassion’s Name.
A key case in Crimes of the Father concerns a Dr Devitt, whom the church seeks to deny access to an open legal process. Parts of this bring to mind the unfortunate case of Dr John Ellis. But this novel would be diminished if it were treated simply as a roman-a-clef. It is a work of grief at least as much as an account of the perversion of justice. Its interests are more profound than the law. The word Keneally uses in his introduction is “mourn”.
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