IRELAND
Irish Times
John Boyne
Perhaps the best way for a novelist to portray evil is through detachment, allowing the story and characters to engage the reader at such an elemental level that a deep emotional response is unavoidable. The evil of child abuse within the Catholic Church is, of course, not a phenomenon limited to Ireland. The Oscar-winning film Spotlight depicted atrocities in Boston parishes while Canadian novelist Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man took on similar events in Nova Scotia. And now the great Australian writer Thomas Keneally – he of Schindler’s Ark – examines abuse within the Sydney diocese in this compelling novel and inevitably finds the clergy to be more interested in protecting the institution than caring for the child.
Keneally makes the decision to set his novel in 1996, before the truth of the scandals was as widely accepted as today. It’s a wise move for it allows us to witness both the scepticism of parishioners and the cynicism of the church as it employed lawyers to discredit victims to minimize both the financial and reputational damage.
The novel opens with a middle-aged priest, Fr Frank Docherty, returning to his home city of Sydney from Toronto to deliver a lecture on priestly paedophilia to an audience of his peers. By chance, the taxi driver who brings him to his Order’s house is a victim of childhood abuse and, as she drops him off and sees the “nineteenth century mansion… with the Celtic cross at the apex of the façade” her previously calm demeanour vanishes and she orders him from her car in a barrage of profanity, but not before he, upset by her distress, leaves his card in the back seat.
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