Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been translated into 59 languages making him the most translated Irish writer of all time.
Evan Keogh is a minor character in the first novella of Boyne’s Elements Quartet, Water (2023) where, like, Earth, it is told in the first person; this time by Evan and his life after he fled the little island off the Irish coast forever, but left with the smell of its earth still under his fingernails.
He has an innate talent for football but no interest in it. He wants to be a painter. His upbringing was hell. An isolated backward place with a brutal and hateful father, a silent and down-trodden mother, and a best friend who betrays him. No wonder he ran away. He has vowed never to return to that island, he knows he is attractive, he is at ease with his sexuality (but always falls for the wrong people), and very ambitious. However, life doesn’t pan out as expected.
It opens in the days before a notorious rape trial. The narrative is two pronged: before and after. Evan, now a famous and wealthy soccer player is accused of accessory to rape; his straight mate, Robbie, accused of the crime itself. As the poor boy sits and waits for the trail to begin we learn about his life in London and how he ended up is such a threatening situation. Then comes the trial itself when we hear the testimony of the rape victim, an intelligent girl called Lauren. But we don’t hear about the testimony of Evan and Robbie; there’s a novelistic reason for that.
What impresses me about Boyne’s writing is it is so clear: the situation, the characters, how they feel, and his narrative choices that keep important plot events dangling before your wished discovery, just out of reach, until you are aching for them.
The scenes of sex and violence are vivid but Boyne’s words lead the reader to imagine them; he doesn’t actually describe them in detail. In other words, there’s more going on in the reader’s head than on the page. That’s good writing in my book, so don’t be fearful of what you might read.
Evan’s final decision is a very satisfying one, but will it finally rid him of that sour smell of his home island’s earth?
The next installment of The Elements Quartet is Fire, scheduled for release in November 2024.
Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been translated into 59 languages making him the most translated Irish writer of all time.
This is my second reading of this book. Back in 2017 I read it for the first time and fell in love with Boyne’s work. Here is my blog from that first reading: it’s still apt and relevant.
Many years ago, on a small plane trip – the plane was small, not the trip – as we were about to land in a provincial Queensland town, I continued to assiduously read my book. I was laughing so much, trying not to, but not succeeding, that my eyes were streaming, my nose running, and my face felt hot and red; the flight attendant broke the rules, unbuckled, and hurried to my seat to ask if I needed medical assistance. I just held up the book; I was unable to speak. She understood. Maybe she’d read it too. It was the hit of the season. The hysterical section was the Nativity Scene from A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) by John Irving. The next time I laughed out loud, many decades later (yes, decades), was with this book, and the (highly illegal) Dinner Party Scene, from early on in The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) by John Boyne. Ironically Boyne has dedicated this book to Irving.
Making people laugh via the written word, and only the written word, is an extremely difficult and hazardous task. You can’t under play it or over sell it, and you certainly can’t ‘back-explain’ it; it’s all to do with tone, and tone is like a law of physics: it only happens when the universal conditions are absolutely right. It’s as if you need to foster a certain psychological state of mind, and write the episode with as much truthfulness and sincerity as you possibly can – don’t elaborate – just tell it, and if the tone is right, it will be hysterical. If it isn’t you can’t go back and make it right, edit it funny, you have to delete it all and start again. A plane will only fly if all the necessary preparations and current circumstances, weather, wind, mechanical health, operational skill, and power source, are perfect.
The dinner party – and it’s impossible to explain why it’s illegal, you’ll just have to read it to find out – is on page 92, but the preparation for it, and the other laugh-out-loud bits, preparation for the tone, I mean, in true Irving-esque fashion, begins right from the first killer sentence; and by the way, the opening sentence of Owen Meany has to be the killer-opening-sentence in all literature. There was a time when I knew it by heart and it became my dinner-party piece for some time after. I can’t sing, tell a joke, or play the piano, you see.
Boyne considers Irving a mentor, and Irving should be chest-thumpingly proud.
It’s impossible for Boyne to escape the moniker of “author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” which he understands only too well, and he’s certain it will appear on his grave stone, so internationally popular was the book and film; but it changed his life making writing full time not only a possibility but a happy necessity.
Boyne was born in 1972. Ireland brought him up but the Church brought him down. He still suffers from its cruelty and hypocrisy. He’s not alone. His anger is present in this book but, much to his credit, he’s fashioned it into a cutting humour without lessening the truth of his understandable hatred.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies explains the life of Cyril Avery, although not a real Avery, from his pre-birth to two months before his death; from 1945 to 2015; and it is also the story of Ireland over that time; from a society dominated, straightjacketed, and suffocated by the Catholic Church, under the guise of strengthening morality, to one that legalises same-sex marriage. It’s a hell of a journey.
It’s full of surprising events, fashion, villains, extremely bad behaviour, political unrest, beauty, deception, selfishness, redemption, tears – yours as well as the character’s, death, forgiveness, love, birth in the midst of murder, politicians behaving badly, coincidences, literature, weddings, doctors behaving courageously, dreams – both fulfilled and dashed, sentiment, laughter, bigotry, violence, and even the ludicrous; in fact the entire palette that paints our lives that all conspires to prove that age-old adage, nobody’s perfect. And all these elements are wound around a cast of characters you won’t easily forget, and nor would you want to.
Boyne skilfully uses many literary devices to tantalise and seduce his readers: he drops in an outcome before explaining how it happened; he triggers the reader’s memory before the character’s; and, best of the lot, dramatic irony: when the reader knows more that the characters do.
I love this book and I’ve recommended it to others, who too have loved it. I’m preparing a space on my bookshelf, between Jane Bowles and Peter Carey. You can get the book, in various formats, here.
Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been translated into 59 languages making him the most translated Irish writer of all time.
This is a single linear story. Yes, there are minor characters but their stories are sufficiently sketched to need no more elaboration. There is just the narrative of a woman whose life, her old life, until now, has been destroyed. Her new life is yet unknown both in location and content. So she runs away. The reason? She doesn’t know. There are several possibilities to choose from but none of them stand out as more or less important. She hides on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of western Ireland. She changes her name. She cuts off her hair.
It’s a short novel. A quick read. But an emotional one.
This is the second book where Boyne has chosen to use a female first person narrator: the first, All the Broken Places (2022). This narrator, Willow, her new name, takes residence in a small cottage near the sea. The locals, including a cat, are surprised by her, especially so since she seems not to have a husband, children, or a job. She is content to take long walks, watch the grey days, revel in what sunshine there is, and tries not to worry too much that there isn’t any Internet. Sometimes she walks into the village to get a sandwich and a bowl of soup at the New Pub. Sometimes she goes to the Old Pub. Sometimes she talks to people, sometimes they talk to her.
Slowly she can feel a possible life, sort of, returning to her. The horror, the truth, of her past is released in bits and asides. They pile upon each other like daubs on a canvas creating, and compiling, a past tangle of events that have you wondering how worse can it get. It does. The real story here is what happened to her; this, her running away, is her immediate response to those dreadful deeds. And here in this small isolated community she is forced to look at herself and wonder if she could’ve done something, anything, to avert the destruction. Is there guilt? And if so, there is blame.
Many writers, often-read and famous, have described the art of fiction writing as a force from without that could be from god, infers Jon Fosse; Colm Tóibín says its like opening a window and letting your imagination fly; Alexander McCall Smith describes it as allowing the subconscious to escape; Jennifer Egan – this unconscious generation process; writing begins with an idea for an opening and then the rest is done in a kind of trance, Paul Auster; D. H. Lawrence was up to page 145 and I’ve no notion what’s it about; and here’s another one from a more modern writer – it’s like watching a TV show in your head and you just write down what you hear and see. All of these descriptions suggest an amorphous idea, a swirling of fate and luck, of wandering and wondering without knowing what’s coming. That’s true to some degree but Boyne, in this new novel, the first of a quartet, seems far more controlled, he’s in command, and the simplicity of the narrative line gives the impression of meticulous plotting made to feel natural and easy.
The first person narrator frees the writer from worrying about what the other characters are thinking and feeling. The concentration is on the first person, the story-teller, who can only record what they see and hear: a concentrated world view experienced only through the eyes and ears of one person to lead you on. That’s why this novel is so short: a mere 166 pages. Surely, his shortest work. But, it’s a quarter of a much longer piece, that will, one day, I’m sure, be published in one volume: The Elements Quartet, maybe. Water, Earth, Air, and Fire. The second instalment, Earth, is due out in May 2024. Looking forward to that.
Highly recommended.
You can buy the hardcover or Kindle editions here.
John Boyne has never been shy to include historical people and events in his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh et al in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018), the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), and here in The House of Special Purpose (2009) where he places a fictitious character in the household of the final days of the reign of the Romanovs, in Russia, 1917/18.
However it is the adult life and love story of the fictitious character, Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev that is the focus here and dominates the narrative.
It opens in 1981 when Georgy (pronounced YOR gee) is an old man, a retired librarian in London, and his wife, Zoya, is gravely ill. Each chapter swings back and forth from Georgy’s youth as a peasant in rural Russia, the extraordinary event that puts him in the path of a bullet meant for the Tzar’s cousin, his subsequent position as bodyguard for the 11 year old Russian heir, the haemophiliac, Alexei Romanov, and his life, and love, in the Romanov household, to his life in exile after the revolution, Paris first, and his eventual settling in London working at the British Library.
It is a first person narrative in the voice of the protagonist. Of course, Georgy and his wife, suffer discrimnation and hardship, like all émigrés in post revolution and war-torn Europe, but the real drama of the work, and what stimulates the reader’s interest is that the reader, assuming they have even a modicum of knowledge of European history, knows what is going to happen to the Romanovs; Georgy, and of course the royal characters do not. This writerly format, where the reader knows more than the characters, is always a generator of novelistic tension. Here, in this work, it is intensified by the reader’s wonder at how the situation of the young Georgy, in the thrall, and in the service of the Tsar and his family, and in love with one of the Tsar’s daughters transitions to the situation of the elderly Georgy living as a retired librarian with his ill wife in London.
Of course, this is resolved, very neatly, dramatically, and believably even if Boyne uses an existing trope .. erm … but no spoilers here.
In my quest to read all the works of John Boyne, and I only have a few to go, I have yet to find one that surpasses his best – in my opinion – The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) but this earlier work has a lot going for it: history, romance, revolution, and a fitting climax. Highly recommended.
Here you can watch John Boyne talk about, and read from, the book at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC in 2013.
And here is a shorter, but only audio, interview with Boyne about the book.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
John Boyne appeared at the 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Irish writer, John Boyne.
Half way through this fourth novel of John Boyne’s, Next of Kin (2006) I thought, ‘What a grubby little tale.’ That turned out to be quite unfair. It’s a crime novel but not a crime mystery; well, it is to everyone except the protagonist and you, the reader; it’s not a ‘who-done-it’ but a ‘will-he-be-caught’. One of Boyne’s major themes in all his work is family, whether it be happy ones or unhappy ones; this one is definitely of the latter.
Set in 1936 in London and the Montignac’s estate, Leyville, it’s a story of an orphaned boy taken in by his wealthy relatives and brought up as one of the family, in fact, the most favoured one, but of course, nothing goes to plan, except the crime. Or does it? No spoilers here. Owen Montignac is a clever handsome man made all the more so by a head of startling white hair. He is conspicuous wherever he goes. He runs a contemporary art gallery, and does quite well, even though his contempt for the overpriced scratchings of the mediocre artists he exhibits is j-u-s-t kept in check by his paper thin charm. He, along with his cousin Stella, are the sole survivors of the Montignac dynasty, Stella’s brother Andrew having been killed in a shooting accident many years earlier and the story opens at the funeral and wake for Stella’s father, Owen’s uncle, Peter Montignac.
This opening scene is a test for the reader. The cast of characters at the funeral is extensive since a lot of the significant backstory and attitudes to the deceased and, of course, the inheritance are exposed via the conversations of the mourners. If you are a reader who usually skips over names you’ll get yourself into serious trouble here. Boyne doesn’t make it easy for you: there are two characters at the wake called Marjory Redmond and Margaret Richmond, one is a minor character, the other a major one, but you don’t know that then. Stay alert! And, as if to test your memory for names, this early scene is juxtaposed with a court case where you will meet more people, the well-respected Judge, Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC, his wife Jane, always on the lookout for social advancement, especially if it involves The Palace, and their lay-about son Gareth.
What sets this novel above others of its ilk is the important sub-plot of King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and the dilemma for the country, and in particular, for the constitutional judiciary, that the King places everyone in: will he or won’t he marry her?
Boyne has never shied away from incorporating real historical people into his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Tzar Nicolas and the Romanov’s in The House of Special Purpose (2008) and Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018).
How the plot-lines of the Montignacs, the Bentleys, and the future of the English monarchy are interwoven around a crime, its motive, delivery, and resolution is what keeps the reader enthusiastically turning the pages. It’s. Very. Well. Done.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
Yes, this, Boyne’s latest novel, is a sequel, of sorts, to Boyne’s incredibly successful 2006 YP novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – 11 million copies sold world wide – but All the Broken Places (2022) is a novel for adults.
The story follows the adult life of Bruno’s sister, Gretel, post WWII and up to the present day, in her 90s.
Until the devastating climax of Part 1 the tension propelling the reader’s interest, keeping it bubbling away, is almost solely due to the secret Gretel Fernley holds and we readers understand; if you had read this book’s prequel, that is. The narrative begins in Paris 1946, when Gretel is 12, and also in London 2022, where she is in her 90’s. But it’s the Paris story that takes you into her nightmare. There is also tension in the London plot too, again fuelled by Gretel’s secret: her real identity, but I thought when reading it that the payoff would be the book’s climax too: at the end of Part 3. No. I was wrong. The book’s climax was totally unexpected, to this reader, but delivered in the most unsensationalist way: almost as an aside. It’s novelistic decisions like this that set apart great writers from the rest.
Although Gretel’s post war story is basically in three parts: Paris 1946, Sydney 1952, and London 1953, her present story, London 2020, runs along with them, and following her throughout is her past and the guilt she feels because of it. It’s the defining theme of all Gretel’s life decisions and the major theme of the book.
After the fantastical saga, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom (2020) which followed a cast of the same characters over 2000 years, and the almost, slapstick humour of Boyne’s last, The Echo Chamber (2021) – soon to be a TV comedy series, scripted by Boyne – I can happily report that Boyne is back at his narrative best which, for this reader, was his 2017 book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies.
Boyne almost always leads you confidently along his narrative path hand in hand, but with … Furies, and now with ... Broken Places he grabs you by the scruff of the neck.
It would be impossible to relay the plot without giving away the book’s major surprises, of which there are three, and which occur solely when Gretel’s past breaks through, or threatens to break through, into the present. Yet towards the end of her life, it is her own incredible decision, not one forced on her, that finally gives her peace, the redemption she so desperately needs, and the home she believes she deserves.
Here you can purchase the book in various formats.
And here you can buy the audiobook for free by signing up to Audible.
‘If you don’t know, then there’s very little point in me trying to explain.’
‘I’ll have you know that Croydon is becoming quite gentrified these days.’
‘I just prefer a postcode that begins with a SW, that’s all,’ said George.
‘My father instilled certain values in me from the start that have stood me in good stead over the years. Carrying a monogrammed handkerchief, for example. Having a good tailor. Matching one’s belt with one’s shoes. The stuff of civilised living.’
‘You can’t make life decisions based on letters of the alphabet.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
It sounds like Boyne’s channelling Noel Coward! But if you’re out to write a comic novel Coward isn’t a bad role model.
Boyne calls The Echo Chamber, his 13th novel for adults, a farce and indeed it is; and it should be read as one. Outrageous characters with appalling attitudes, self-serving decisions with names to match. Boyne, I think, had a ball writing this one and after his pummelling via social media by internet trolls and hate-loving twitter-ites over his last YA book, My Brother’s Name is Jessica (2019) – he could’ve avoided a lot of angst had he called it My Sister’s Name was Jason – he had a lot to say and scream at, and a lot to get off his chest.
The plot involves a famous British couple, George Cleverly, a Michael Parkinson-like BBC TV talk-show host; his popular novelist wife, Beverly Cleverly, who since her first success now employs ‘ghosts’ to pen her novels; their three Children, Nelson, an anxious nelly who can’t make up his mind who he is but likes to wear uniforms; Elizabeth, a social-media acolyte whose narcissism is only second to that of the youngest, Achilles, who scams older men via his charm and good looks while waiting to get laid by any pretty girl who sees him. It’s a family to loath but you also hope it will suddenly see the errors of its ways and move to the Outer Hebrides, or at least to somewhere without an Internet connection.
This book is a lot of fun and is nothing like anything Boyne has written before. I hope he’s freed himself from his victimhood, taken a deep breath, and, since he’s blessed with booming sales, he will eventually, once all the PR appearances, chat-shows, and media interviews are over, settle down and chill out and let his novelistic talent that created, The Absolutist (2011), The History of Loneliness (2014), and (his masterpiece) The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017), surge again. THAT I’m looking forward to very much.
The Echo Chamber is a great quick read to make you laugh out loud, groan a few times, and blow away a few lockdown cobwebs.
Tring, a small town NW of London, in Herefordshire, holds an annual Book Festival; you can watch John Boyne being interviewed by fellow writer, Clare Pooley, at the 2021 event and talking about The Echo Chamberhere.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
In my attempt to read John Boyne’s entire work for adults I’m continually impressed by the variety of people, places, times, and voices he uses.
2000: The Thief of Time – a story, from 1758: the adventures of a man who forgets to die
2001: The Congress of Rough Riders – about William Cody, the son of Buffalo Bill.
2004: Crippen – 1910, London, the body of a singer is discovered
2006: Next of Kin – 1936, a cunning son tries to overturn his father’s will
2008: Mutiny on the Bounty – the classic story told by the cabin boy, Jacob Turnstile
2009: The House of Special Purpose – early 20 century, the Russian Tsar and revolution
2011: The Absolutist – Tristan Sadler and his shocking secret of WWI
2014: A History of Loneliness – an Irish priest confronts faith, friendship, and conscience
2017: The Heart’s Invisible Furies – the life and times of Cyril Avery, Boyne’s masterpiece
2018: A Ladder To The Sky – a would-be but uninspired writer finds other ways to be one
2020: A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom – one family, the 1st century to the near future
2021: The Echo Chamber – a comic novel of social media – to be released 5th August
This House is Haunted (2013), as the jacket tells us, and the title implies, is a ghost story. By being so upfront about what the book is, Boyne undermines any reticence a potential reader, like me, might have about ‘believing’ such a story. I don’t usually read ghost stories and wouldn’t necessarily have chosen this one except for the author. But knowing what it is, there is no need for Boyne to ‘convince’ you to go along with it; even as you open page one you are already going along with it.
Boyne tells the straight-forward story in the past tense, in a first person narrative, as a young, determined, but plain woman, Eliza Caine in 1867. It’s not often that a writer writes in the gender not their own; Peter Carey, Jill Dawson, Ann Patchett have tried it, most don’t. Writing in the third person about a protagonist of another gender is very different to writing as the protagonist of another gender. Eliza faces an uncertain future after the death of her father and therefore unhesitatingly takes a governess position to the Westerly children of Gaudlin Hall in Norfolk. Her arrival is, of course, on a dark and stormy night and the house is large, shadowy, and turreted. The back story and her attempts to meet the seemingly elusive parents, to understand the deaths of three out of her four predecessors, and her growing relationship with enigmatic Isobella, quiet Eustace, and the other tight-lipped staff constitute the narrative; unexplainable incidents abound until Eliza is forced to admit, mainly to her practical self, that she is confronted, not by one spirit, but two. Who are they, and why are they still there?
Like Peter Cary in My Life as a Fake, and Ann Patchett in The Dutch House both avoid any writerly pitfalls – writing in another gender – when it comes to matters of sex and romance by either making their protagonists uninterested in all that stuff (Carey) or not mentioning it at all (Patchett); Boyne also avoids such pitfalls by making his heroine especially plain and seemingly resigned to her probable spinsterhood. Good and sensible choices by all three, I suspect.
The climax is, as expected, dramatic and almost filmic in its ghostly effects and although the ending is relatively happy – no spoilers here – it has a sting in its tail.
This is a holiday-read, never demanding, always intriguing and for those of you who are familiar with this genre, I expect, completely satisfying.
“You can’t judge a book by its cover” goes the old saying, but of course we do. The cover of John Boyne’s 7th adult novel, The Absolutist (2011), tells us a lot: WW I, soldiers, a white feather, trench warfare. So here’s the opening lines,
Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in a fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years. ‘There was the vicar of Leeds’s she said, smiling a little …‘
This is one of the things I like about Boyne: he sparks curiosity, intrigue, interest at every turn.
In 1919, Tristan Sadler, on the eve of his twenty first birthday, is going to Norwich to deliver a bunch of letters to a woman he’s never met. In a pub he thinks about getting drunk, causing a scene, getting arrested, and being put back on the next train to London, then … I wouldn’t have to go through with it.
The woman is Marian Bancroft, the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he met in army training, served with in the trenches of France, who refused to fight anymore, and who was court-martialed and shot. He was also the man Tristan Sadler fell in love with.
There is a melancholic tone to this story, but one in which Boyne trickles out important information and intriguing details which adds to the vivid characterisations and keeps your interest high.
There are two narratives: Tristan’s tough journey in 1919 to see the sister of his secret lover and public traitor, Will Bancroft, and interspersed with this, the events of 1916/17 when he first met Will at army training, and then in the rat and mud infested trenches of France where the devastating climax is revealed. But there is a coda: Tristan and Marian meet 60 years later, in 1979, when he is a famous novelist, and she a prickly woman still, widow, and grandmother, who had never liked reading novels. “Actually, I came around to them in the end. Just not yours.” It’s a bold but satisfying end to “a wonderful, sad, tender book,” says the quote from Colm Tóibín; another bit of truth on the front cover.
Boyne’s adult writing is literary fiction but his style isn’t dry or over written or weighed-down by internal musings. This one, in essence, is a story of a man going on a train to visit a stranger. The interest is why he is going, how (if) he will tell her, and what will happen then? This, of course, depends on Tristan’s backstory which is where the real plot is. Boyne is fundamentally a storyteller and he always does this admirably by putting the plot in the hands and minds of three-dimensional, flawed, but brave characters. The structure also seems right. It’s neat and satisfying and not surprising that the film rights have been bought by Ridley Scott. Although there has been no news about the production since the cast (William Moseley, Jack O’Connell, Derek Jacobi, Joely Richardson, Colin Firth, Vanessa Redgrave) and director (Stephen Daltry) were announced in 2013.
This 2011 work is up there with Boyne’s best.
Highly recommended.
Here is a short video of John Boyne talking about the inspiration for The Absolutist.
When you are born into a Judeo-Christian society you are a product of that society whether you subscribe to the belief system or not, and that goes for all societies that have a belief system at their core.
Belief systems have accompanied human existence since the year dot; they predate governments and were in fact human’s first taste of governance. It belies our history to denounce religious belief as irrelevant and purely a product of our human ability to imagine a truth even if that truth doesn’t exist. It would be equally absurd to denounce our artistic nature simply because it is another product of our imagination that also allows us to make up stories.
However, there is a difference, a big difference, between a belief system and the administration of that belief system. It is the synagogue, the temple, the mosque, the church that tells their followers what to wear, what they can eat and when to eat it, how to sing, what the god meant, and what they must do to get to a better place; to be blunt, it is the belief system that sustains its followers but the administration that damages them. And to be blunt again, this book is about how a good priest comes to terms with a bad one.
I’m avoiding using the word evil, which shouldn’t really exist as a noun, it is better used only as an adjective: people do evil things, and at the heart of every evil thing is a need. In some cases that need, and the person’s actions to satisfy that need, are distorted, sometimes outrageously so, but nevertheless a need that needs to be sated. In some cases that need isn’t understood even by the perpetrator of the resulting evil deeds which makes them all the more difficult, some say impossible, to judge, correct, or punish.
A History of Loneliness (2014) is the book before Boyne’s master-work, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) – the book that introduced me to this author – and these two books are the only ones set in his native Ireland.
Obran Yates is an Irish boy with a malleable nature. He enters a seminary in 1972 at the behest of his mother because she tells him he has a calling, and we follow his education with its friendships and frustrations, his family with its joys and tragedies, and his work as a teacher and parish priest with its disappointments and sacrifices. In parallel with this history of priestly life is the shadow of sexual abuse at the hands of priests; a shadow that grows and darkens despite that administration’s attempts to ignore it.
We all know about this blight on our Judeo-Christian society. Names like George Pell and Malka Leifer remind us of it almost nightly between Covid-19 news updates.
The writing is assured, confident, and skillful and Boyne pulls no punches. He has confessed to having a hot anger against the Catholic Church for decades but he has channelled that anger to tell a story about a good priest who like most religious leaders do the right thing and sustain the believers in their care, but Boyne also makes it clear that the old response – don’t let a few bad apples taint the whole barrel – is a very poor one. Why? because the administration of christianity is rigidly hierarchical and fiercely insular in its protection of itself, to the point of betraying then abandoning those in its care. Speaking out against their own is not what priests do. They should and hopefully will.
The belief system says “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” and the administration of that belief system has completely reversed and blighted the meaning.
This is a book that needs to be read. It is also a great argument for the power of fiction to tell us the truth.
Here is an interview with John Boyne about A History of Loneliness.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
Michael K Freundt 