The story of loneliness

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The story of loneliness ( A History of Loneliness ) is a novel by John Boyne , who appeared in the original English language in 2015 in German and Dutch and 2016 in other languages, 2014. It is about the life cycle of a Irish - Catholic priest against the background of a deep crisis of his church, which shook the country due to widespread sexual abuse of children by clergy, since 1990th

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Father Odran Yates describes his life from childhood to the end of his 6th decade, from 1964 to 2012. The most important event for him is a radical change in public opinion about the role of the predominant Catholic Church. The image of the priest changes completely in these years. In the place of a highly respected, often preferred person until the 1980s, there is a figure who is viewed critically, mocked and whose dealings with children are closely controlled. For many compatriots, the Catholic clergyman in Ireland mutates into a terrible outsider, a dark figure. For Ordran, who loves his job, this is difficult to bear. But in view of the social upheavals and his loneliness in old age, he cannot avoid giving an account of his path through the decades.

The catalyst for the change in the reputation of priests were government reports of widespread sexual abuse of children and adolescents, especially boys, in local Catholic communities and institutions. Several priests were sentenced by the judiciary and sent to prison. Higher ranks of the hierarchy , (arch) bishops, cardinals, had veiled or even covered up these crimes for decades. After the court rulings and several official reports, the Church rapidly declined in importance within a few years.

The factual novel portrays the crisis through the eyes of a priest who is not a perpetrator. He has been friends with Tom, one of the later convicted intensive offenders, since the time of the seminary, which one enters at the age of 17; he called him "his best friend". The novel seems like an autobiography to the reader, the first-person form underscores this. Ordran's story thematizes his knowledge of Tom's crimes, which he had repressed for decades.

The church

Boyne portrays the Irish Church as corrupt, immobile and extremely power-conscious. Although she has known the crimes, especially against altar boys , for decades, she only reacts by constantly relocating the perpetrators to other parishes where they continue their activities. Complainant parents are intimidated and threatened with social exclusion. Since 1990, when the crimes have become so widely known that a counter-movement has formed, the hierarchy seeks to intimidate the media. Above all, she wants to prevent state and thus legal measures against the culprits. Boyne hardly mitigates the negative image of the hierarchy. During Ordran's academic year in Rome, Pope John Paul I (who was in office for a very short time) indicated to him that there were major problems with the Irish Church; Ordran later suspects that this was related to the sex crimes.

Boyne's hierarchy is incapable of catharsis . She loves her rule over the Irish and the Irish state, which had been so comfortable until then, all too much. As the processes become more numerous and as a result the state takes action ( Murphy report and the other reports before and after), their power crumbles all the faster. But Boyne sees no real admission of guilt by the church, in his eyes the clergy are not yet ready.

In Ireland, 9 out of 10 schools are run by the Catholic Church, often as boarding schools. There were also many cases of abuse in these schools. Above all, there were serious educational grievances there. Everything was aimed at breaking the will of the children and young people, depriving them of all self-determination. Ordran's own seminar time was also shaped. Perhaps this breaking of his self-will has made him appear so naive, fearful, passive, ignorant and indecisive, even cowardly, to the reader. Ordran consistently bears his head in the sand, he lacks empathy , also in other things, as the opening scene shows, which deals with a serious illness of his sister. He seldom shows vitality, he is a tragic figure.

The protagonists are lonely, neither of the two manages to get really close to the other even in the confines of the seminar cell. From the spiritual superiors, e.g. B. in the home, do not expect any pastoral behavior, they do not even speak to them, they are only disciplinarian, often violent.

The victims

The crime victims are mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 16. One case in which Ordran is unwittingly involved ends with the boy's suicide. Another crime, in his own family, means that a happy, carefree boy only reacts angrily and violently to his surroundings after the crime. Boyne introduces us to several such victims without describing the deeds; he dedicates the whole book to the victims. A Dubliner attacks Ordran, recognizable as a priest by his habit , physically and verbally during the trial in a café. It is later revealed that the man used to be a victim of abuse.

Ordran's nephew Aidan was also a victim of Tom. In response, Aidan has closed Ireland internally, hates it, and emigrated.

Ordran, the good priest

The emphasis of the book is on the experience and feelings of the two adolescent or then adult clergy, be they a conscious perpetrator like Tom or an, initially unconscious, confidante like Ordran.

When Ordran begins his training as a priest, he is happy; The celibacy associated with the office does not bother him, even in the seminar it is hardly ever an issue. Ordran often speaks coldly, he almost never shows any emotional closeness. In his youth he takes life easy, both the dramatic family history and an abusive assault by the old parish priest seemingly unscathed. The latter dies shortly afterwards in an accident:

“He crossed Dawson Street towards St. Stevens Park without looking left or right and was run over by an 11 bus to Drumcondra . People came in droves to his funeral. "

- Boyne, laconic about an abuser; German P. 127

As Ordran gets older, he suppresses everyday anger and is content with his quiet life. Above all, this includes an “order”, e.g. B. the books in the school library he runs. What does not fit in with the order displaces order. When his inner order is shaken by the forced transfer to a community after 20 years of life there, he can only endure his unrest through even stronger repression.

Boynes' novel describes the memory of the old Ordran of his life; what Ordran does not manage is an explanation for its enormous displacement power, which it has performed for decades. Is there an indirect complicity in Ordran? Should he have suspected something, should have guessed, even if he only met Tom sporadically after her seminar? Over the years, there have been a number of signs, some of them quite clear, of Tom's crimes. At the end of the book, Ordran acknowledges his complicity: guilt through silence. He draws the conclusion from this and gives up the priesthood despite his advanced age.

Boyne also addresses homosexuality in one episode by having Ordran conduct a pastoral conversation with a mother and her son. Trying to convince the mother that she accepts her son's way of life, he says of himself:

“He was still a boy to me. The fact that he desired another person or was desired by another person hurt me, since such feelings were completely alien to me. "

- Ordran about his asexuality ; German P. 144

The problem

The novel is about a social issue in the Republic of Ireland with a religious background. Boyne sees the causes of widespread child abuse by church officials on the one hand to be located on the social level, namely a power of the clergy that was previously almost uncontrolled. Depending on this, he sees family problems: Ordran becomes a candidate for a priest at the age of 17 because of a vision of his young widowed mother; Tom, the same age, is the last of 8 children in the family to be violently beaten into this training by his father; the priesthood promised a good social advancement for poorer children.

Boyne repeatedly suggests misogyny and physical hostility among Catholic officials as an ideological motive . It is the core of a religious mistake:

“They taught me that everything that makes me human is dirty. That I have to be ashamed of it. "

- Tom about his seminar time, Dt. P. 405

Boyne portrays the religious beliefs of his Irish characters as if they had degenerated into pure outwardness, into rites. Therefore, neither the repressive Catholic sexual morality nor the stressful childhood experiences alone explain why priests became pedo criminals .

"Nothing you've experienced justifies your actions."

- Ordran to Tom, after his release from prison, Dt. P. 403

The novel form

Reviewers asked why Boyne is such a difficult subject as a novel. Roman-like elements are satirical scenes in the Vatican; Ordran's unsuccessful fall in love with a waitress; the age-related development of the main characters in the manner of a development novel ; Family stories that are embellished with some dramatic elements such as marital marriage, murder, suicide, serious illness or emigration; self-righteous gossip among neighbors; a competition among train passengers to see who can give the young priest Ordran his seat or provide him with food. Boyne tells first-person. The chapters each correspond to a year, but they are not arranged chronologically; even within a chapter, the narrator looks back again and again to previous years (flashback) and thus creates tension.

The place where Ordran worked as a teacher and librarian for 27 years has an autobiographical connotation, as Boyne himself attended Terenure College as a student. His pictures of horny priests are also based in part on his own experiences, as Boyne told the Irish Times . He writes about the personal background of the novel. His psychological strain was caused by the fact that he was only able to write the first book to be set in his native Ireland after many other novels and stories.

The Boynes language is sometimes described as melodramatic, almost biblical, a tone that was also to be found in his youth novels with a serious background.

Reviews, author interviews, opinions

  • Jürgen Wandel: Review : Deeply shaken. Novel about the change of Ireland. Time signals . Evangelical Commentaries on Religion and Society, January 2016 (also as print)
  • Helen Dunmore : Review , in The Guardian October 3, 2014 (in English)
  • The Irish Times reported repeatedly on the book in 2014-2016, some of which can be found in one dossier (online). Including a longer interview with the author (in German: on the Piper-Verlag website for the book)
  • Jennifer Bort Yacovissi: review . The Washington Independent, February 27, 2015 (in English)
  • Elizabeth Warkentin: Boyne takes on the legacy of priests in Catholic Ireland - and how to overcome the shame. The Star , February 21, 2015 (in English) online
  • Jim Carmin: A gorgeous and painful novel about an Irish priest caught in the middle of the 1980s abuse scandal that devastated the Catholic Church. Minneapolis Star Tribune , Feb. 7, 2015. online
  • Rachel Martin: Interview with Boyne , NPR , Feb. 1, 2015 (in English)
  • Joyce Carol Oates : The book is very beautiful and well written, there is an angry undertone in it. The title of the book hits it perfectly. A portrait of someone we thought we knew. But in reality we have no clue of its shallows.
  • Phil Baker: The book is gripping, tormenting, extremely moving. It's a painful reading experience, you can't stop. Here both the priesthood and the wider cultural crisis of Ireland are dissected on the living, three-dimensional object. The Sunday Times , London
  • John Irving : The compelling narrative is complex and seamlessly structured. The path to the priesthood that Odran Yates follows is both understandable and drawn with empathy. Father Yates is a "good guy"; when false accusations are made against him, he shows himself innocent. Father Yates feels responsible for the sins of others. There is no other contemporary writer who treats the question of guilt with such depth and sadness as Boyne. When Father Yates finds himself guilty of everything he has failed to do, nothing less is on trial than the Catholic Church's duplicity and cover-up maneuvers. We have Boyne's most important novel here. It is of fundamental importance to the history of Ireland. As a novel, it moves us; no reader can stop until they get to the disturbing end of the book.
  • Maddie Crum: The book we're talking about: 'A History Of Loneliness' , Huffington Post , Jan. 28, 2015
  • Timothy P. Schilling: Priests as pariahs , in Commonweal Magazine, New York NY, December 2, 2015
  • Jenny Barlow: Sin, silence and scandal: Sunday Express , September 13, 2014
  • Francis Phillips: An angry polemic against the Church disguised as fiction, The Catholic Herald, London, October 28, 2014
  • Kevin Nance: Review , USA Today , Life section, Feb. 27, 2015

See also

source

  • John Boyne: The Story of Solitude. Novel. Translated by Sonja Finck . Piper, Munich 2015 ISBN 3492060145
  • Additional translations: Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Italian. The English version is published by different publishers depending on the continent (Europe, North America, Australia-New Zealand).

notes

  1. ^ German on the Piper-Verlag website for this book, additional information also in The Guardian , October 3, 2014
  2. ↑ Irish Times -> Culture -> Books-> The Book Club, a discussion platform. In it, among other things, a podcast , a conversation with Boynes with 2 audio readers , as well as several other sites, use the site search function
  3. ↑ Boyne: A lot of people who ended up being abusers were never, themselves, given a chance in life. Boyne also speaks to the target audience for the book: people who are both extremely defensive of priests and those who disparage them extremely. The abusive priest also has a tragic history behind him. And the good priests, too, were dragged down into the vortex of negation.
  4. ↑ Nance goes into Ordran's conversation with a homosexual boy and his insecure mother, in which he tries to teach his mother a modern conception