On Monday we announced A History of Loneliness by John Boyne as our first Irish Times Book Club reading choice. Not to boast, but I've already finished it. It's a fascinating read, full of passionate intensity and anger at the damage wreaked by clerical sex abuse in Ireland and the Catholic Church's attempts to cover it up.
If you haven’t started reading it yet, though, don’t worry. There is still plenty of time before the bestselling author sits down in a few weeks to discuss the book in a studio podcast with me and a couple of book club members, Hans Zomer and Jacinta Wright. Every reader will then have the opportunity to put their own question to John Boyne in an hour-long webchat.
But to start the ball rolling, I asked Christina Hunt Mahony, who reviewed A History of Loneliness for us earlier this year (which you can read by clicking on the link on the left-hand side here), to come up with some questions, which you may find helpful to consider as you read the novel.
1. Boyne chooses not to present the events in the life of Odran Yates chronologically. A narrative of this sort gives a writer considerable freedom and, like all such choices, can shape our perception of the character. Did this device influence your reading of the character?
2. The priest as a character in Irish writing is a long and complex tradition in all genres and runs on a spectrum from saintly to evil. WB Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh in poetry; James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and John McGahern in prose; John B Keane and Tom Murphy in the theatre, to name a few. Where do Boyne's priests fit into that tradition?
3. Modernism introduced the use of brand names into fiction. Think of Joyce's Plumtree's potted meats in Ulysses. Boyne's novel mentions specific brands to recall the recent past. Do these objects help to anchor you as a reader to the period being portrayed?
4. This is Boyne's first novel set primarily in Ireland, but part of the book takes place in Rome, in particular in the enclosed world of the Vatican City. Are these two locales equally well evoked?
Christina Hunt Mahony is the author of Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition (Macmillan, 1999), and edited Out of History: Essays of the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Carysfort Press, 2006). She is a visiting lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Georgetown University and The Catholic University of America in Washington DC, where she directed graduate studies at The Center for Irish Studies.
Next Friday: John Boyne opens up about the personal torment that inspired A History of Loneliness.
“I’ve spent the past two years recalling experiences from my childhood and teenage years that I would rather forget, reliving events that should never have taken place and recreating through fiction, moments that seemed small at the time but that I’ve come to realise caused me great damage. Which makes me think that the real reason I never wrote about Ireland until now is explained in the opening sentence of my novel:
'I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.'"
