IRELAND
Irish Independent
Fiction: Crimes of the Father, Thomas Keneally, Sceptre Books, hdbk, 400 pages, €26.59
Andrew Lynch
June 18 2017
Antipodean Booker-winner Thomas Keneally’s new novel tells the story of a liberal priest’s uncovering of paedophilia in the Catholic church during the mid-1990s.
In an early scene from Thomas Keneally’s poignant new novel about clerical sex abuse, a young Australian woman called Maureen Breslin goes searching for her Irish roots on the Donegal coast. She is particularly impressed by an outdoor Mass stone, where fugitive Catholic priests used to hold ceremonies for their followers in defiance of Britain’s Penal Laws.
Thinking about the “barefooted, shawled and huddled poor” quietly praying in stiff Atlantic gales, Maureen feels an overpowering responsibility to honour their memory.
“This stone is my inheritance, I thought. An inheritance of the oppressed, too. How could I let the people who stood here, hungry and ill-clothed, go from my life?”
Shortly afterwards, Maureen’s faith is put to its most severe test yet. She wants to enjoy normal sexual relations with her husband, but the year is 1968 and Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae has dashed any hopes that the church might ease its ban on contraception.
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