John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness asserts through its title that we will be confronted with a story of one isolated or excluded. The history is a confession, addressed to readers as “you” and by extension the history is a testimony. The narrator, Father Odran Yates, is a witness to the transformation of the Irish Catholic church – particularly to the esteem accorded priests and the institution of the church by lay people. At the end of his priestly career, Father Yates finds himself disillusioned and alone – divided in his self-condemnation and his remaining faith in his vocation and the church.

One would expect a hostile review of forty years of recent Irish Catholic history from a John Boyne who said in an interview: “my priests and educators made me feel worthless, and disparaged and humiliated me at every turn.” Indeed the author is gay, and records callous beatings and harsh spiritual strictures leading to extensive bouts of depression. His subject in the novel is the pedophile scandal that scarred so many boys and adolescents and which was willfully hidden, despite the risks to so many young people. The salvific aspect of the novel is that his narrator is a good priest, one who recognizes the strength of his own vocation, and in so far as he trusted the hierarchy which he obeyed he fell into the sin of omission. He refused in an unsettling denial to suspect those closest to him of “interfering” with children.

I use the word “salvific” carefully: the novel should be read as way to a just response to the great crimes of abuse. Boyne’s handling of Father Yates’s voice is the central achievement. The viewpoint is one of hindsight; the revelations of duplicity and complicity in suppressing the predatory treatment of children isolates Yates. He seems, in self-accusation, to lose affect, to view his ministry as one lived by false surmise – about the integrity of his superiors, the honesty of his fellow priests. The narrative tone resonates with the “loneliness” of the title; indeed, Yates might feel as if he alone did not see what was going on around him, particularly in the life of his oldest friend and fellow priest Tom Cardle.

The time sequence of the narrative is marked off by chapter headings giving the date of the year in which the following events fall. We begin in time present, return to childhood and the pressure on Odran by his mother to fulfill his vocation, and move a-chronologically to his sister’s marriage, his tenure as teacher and librarian in a boys’ school, his enviable position as a student in Rome and attendant on the Pope, and then in his troubled relationship with Tom Cardle – whose trial for pedophilia Odran attends and haltingly comprehends, finally, as the true nature of his brother priest’s life.

There are odd and jarring aspects of Odran’s life – he irrationally stalks a waitress when he is a student in Rome – which seem false moves on Boyne’s part in an attempt to fill out the life of a character. But the priest’s isolation is only heightened by the suicide of his father (and the suspected drowning of his younger brother), his sister’s early onset dementia, and his friend Tom’s frequent reassignment to disparate parishes. This is a bleak life, but one of conviction in his service to God.
Most unsettling is Boyne’s account of Odran’s meetings with his bishop. The misogyny and cynicism so easily mouthed by so highly placed a clergy man is rendered in telling dialogue. Odran emerges finally into understanding and, bearing that shock, he cringes listening to a telling radio interview with the bishop, now Cardinal, in his futile attempts to protect the church’s and his reputation. The secrets are out, and so is the respect that the Irish Church had so easily commanded with the laity.

Boyne contrasts the almost fawning attention of lay people on a train who virtually force their generosity on the newly ordained Father Yates, and the physical violence he suffers for wearing his while collar and clerical garb when he attends Cardle’s trial. The author is convincing in his explorations of a question that so many have asked: how could the abuse of children have gone on so long and how could the “cover ups” been carried out at the highest levels of the Church’s hierarchy?
Boyne records his own illumination :

The challenge for me was to write a novel about the other priest, the genuine priest, the one who has given his life over to good works and finds himself betrayed by the institution to which he has given everything. In doing so, I was trying to uncover goodness where I had spent a lifetime finding evil.

Living inside Odran’s consciousness throughout the course of the novel reveals both compliance and complicity. He dared not allow himself to think what he did not wish to acknowledge. This was his betrayal by and betrayal of church and people. In a concluding scene Odran confronts Cradle; righteous anger dissipates in the dampening effect of honesty. He must condemn Cradle and, if truth be told in ways he has never told the truth to himself, admit a passive complicity.   

I can recommend this work as a cautionary tale, an honest inhabiting of the mind of one who grows into a knowledge that displaces him from the clerical world that he called for so long his home. The conclusion, however, is despondent – where in his vocation is the call from God?

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Edward T. Wheeler, a frequent contributor, is the former dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.

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