Chantel's Reviews > A History of Loneliness

** spoiler alert ** It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book as well as those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters which contain reflections on abuse, child endangerment, Hebephilia, Pedophilia, death of a child, sexual abuse of minors, physical abuse of minors, psychological distress, mental illness, religious extremism, terminal illness, the suicide of a minor, & others.

Alongside the content warning, I would like to highlight that if you are someone for whom reading repeated instances where both graphic descriptions & dedicated insinuations are given regarding the abuse of minors, is overwhelming, triggering, debilitating, or other; this is a book I would encourage you to put aside. The subject matters approached in this book deal entirely with the actions taken by sexual predators as well as those undertaken by others systemically protecting these actions. There is very little of this story that does not impart mental reflection on the realities these minors were forcibly subjected to throughout a great many years. Therefore, please be kind to yourself & do not pursue this book or my review if you are not in a position to be faced with this matter.

Odran Yates is a priest in the Catholic Church in Ireland. He narrates a series of events over the course of multiple years in his life which have shaped him to be the man lying face-down on the earth, wondering if things could have been different, had he only been someone else. He is surrounded by people bold enough to put thought into action regardless if these choices are good or bad. The reader meets Odran in a compromising position, one that leaves our roaming eyes with that same reflection; had Odran been anyone else, had the circumstances been anything other than what they are, one might be left with feelings of pity for the poor soul who was meant to drown in the waves that fateful summer day. Yet, I cannot feel anything but anger towards Odran.

This is a book that has left me feeling cheated. I feel annoyed at myself for wanting the main character to be a good person, for his actions to have carried through & formed a unified front with his inner monologue. However, time after time, Odran proved to me that he was incapable of being honest, of seeking out the protagonist in himself, the one he diligently wanted me to believe he was. Instead, he was the best friend of a repeated & prolific child predator; a man who wanted to sit in the graces of this child abuser because he couldn’t face himself in a mirror to come to terms with the reality of his position, one of a lonely whimpering, rain-drenched leaf at the bottom of a mildew rotten sunken ship, shot down for the war crimes it sought to inflict.

Why do I feel so much annoyance? This is not a question without an answer for I know myself distinctly; understanding that in books I wish to see the change we have avoided in reality. How dare Odran walk back into Aidan’s life after he deliberately allowed someone he knew to be a child sexual predator to roam the boy's house at night? How dare he lie to the face of his own nephew who had to deal with the physical & psychological repercussions of such levels of abuse, only to admit to himself due to the words spoken to him by the perpetrator, that he is also the villain in this story. How dare he.

Yet, how like reality this fictional work is, indeed. So riddled with nuisance as to whom we are meant to trust, whom we are to want to see succeed. I can say confidently that I feel no shame in admitting that they should all burn for such unforgivable things, as those that the children have had to endure at the hands of barbarically inept human beings as the adults in this scenario. Why should I feel conflicted about my sentiments towards Odran? He is, after all, the root cause of the abuse his nephew suffered. I should feel more care to see a four-leaf-clover fly away in the wind than to watch him punished in my field of vision for what he deliberately allowed to happen. However, that is not what this story is asking of the reader. It is easy to point the finger, that is all that happens throughout this story.

When it mattered to speak out, everyone whispered. When it mattered to listen, the ears of the deaf were more attentive. How can this be? However difficult it is to admit, everyone is part of the problem while many are simultaneously a victim of the system. If one is to take Odran’s experiences as a primary example one might wonder when this character was ever meant to revolt against everything he had known. This is a character who had the deaths of his brother & father diminished to darkness in his memory for the level of traumatic upheaval they caused his psyche. However, they nibbled at him still for how could he completely forget what had happened when he was living in the imposed constraints such a tragedy caused his family, within the actions of his religious extremist mother who threw him at the first religious figure she saw because her son was evoking ‘normal’ teenage emotions.

This is not to say that I do not believe that Dissociative Amnesia played a part in Odran’s life, I very much believe that to be the case. However, he was constantly reminded of things he wished to forget — so to say — by the behaviour of his mother. Yet, can we blame her? There was a time when people wanted to trust that religious figures were honest, truthful, & kind people. This is not something we can say is innately wrong for, haven’t we all, at least once, sought in wish or desire, to trust someone? Certainly, we cannot look upon the centuries of religious abuse of power as indicative that these figures of supposed God’s voice, were in fact playthings for the Devil himself, can we?

This is a difficult question to answer, just as there may be one rotten apple in a tree, one needs to examine the trunk to determine whether or not the entity is rotten to the core. So too have religions throughout all of humankind been privy to both honest & dishonest, kind & unkind, people. The Catholic Church was meant to protect its believers, it was meant to give them a reason for being; guiding them with chorus & community into the welcoming hands of their Lord. Yet, these same figureheads found themselves riddled to the brim with child predators. Why is that? Again, we find ourselves with an impossibly difficult question to answer.

One may say that the victims of abuse at the hands of religious figures were suppressed because it seems impossible that a person who proclaimed themselves vocationally inclined in the field, was at once a man of God & a man who abused children. Therefore, one may note that perhaps this was a field of work wherein such barbaric peoples felt comfortable; felt that they could hide in plain sight for who would ever question a person who said to hear the word of God from the Man himself? However, one might also note that for those same reasons, the Catholic Church has highlighted itself as being the epicentre for child sexual abuse because people cannot believe that this would be the place, of all places, where a predator would feel safe to act on their impulses.

By this I mean, we might regard the high number of cases brought to the forefront by those brave children, as being believed because it was impossible that a man of the cloth should be such a horrible person therefore, he should be evicted from the community. Is believing in the goodness at the core of religions bad? No. Is being part of a religion, a community of peers seeking to pray for salvation & grace, bad? No. However, hosting a community of repression & silence, fostering a feeding ground for people who prey on the vulnerability cultivated in wanting to believe in a higher power, is devilishly wrong. 95 Theses & I should think one of them wrung true to the core of the fact.

With these questions, we are brought round to the essence of Odran’s story. Who is at fault for his negligence? It is at once his own fault for deciding that he did not have it within his person to face the facts; his esteemed lifelong friend was a sexual predator, & he was a bad man & Odran ignored this because he did not want to experience confrontation. This leads us to the fault that lies at the hands of those who raised Odran to be the way that he was. The people who thumped him into the ground until he was forever quiet, forever silenced. This is the priest who molested him, it is his father who experienced serious levels of anger & violence, & it is his own mother who willfully ignored the world around her for the security she sought in organized religion.

Our species have been pondering the question of ‘nature versus nurture’ for centuries, if not longer. As with this story, we could be pointing fingers at others forever. What is troublesome is admitting to ourselves, as Odran had to do at the conclusion of this story, that one is responsible for one's own actions, to an extent at least. How easy would it have been for Odran to randomly break the mould he was fitted for upon his birth? How likely would it have been that he would seek to do this because he could not go on as he was? It is impossible to say because he never did either of these. The reader is faced with the difficult decision as to whether or not Odran should be believed & whether or not it is worth their time to trust that this character is remorseful for his neglect.

With that, I will say that this made the reading experience extremely difficult for me. I remain steadfast in my sentiments against those who abuse children; a stance I shall never falter from holding. However, as Boyne wrote onward, I could not help but feel frustrated at his ease; crafting dimensional characters who would be remembered as that kindly, mousy friend, & who would be recalled as the person who unbelievably was the perpetrator of their own experiences on to others. These are the markers of a stellar writer & one who enamoured me in the narrative at once. I wanted to be led through the timeline, I felt intrigued & interested, I wanted to believe that Odran never knew a thing.

Yet, just as Tom refused to speak his truth, choosing instead to repeat the offences done to him in his childhood, so too did Odran recycle the actions transferred to him & so, the finger-seeking blame needs to become ten or twenty. Specifically, when children are involved, it is difficult to say that it was in the hands of one person for aren’t we loath to forgive a parent we deem neglectful, a figure we simply couldn’t believe to be abusive, an adult we thought we knew. Every character in this book plays the villain; every person partakes in the final form that these people have become.

What I found to be the most troublesome aspect of this book are the questions it has left me with. Boyne’s writing swept me into a world that was riddled with ghouls at every turn yet, I wanted to believe that there would be an archangel come to save the day. How can someone write about reality in such a way as to have me hoping against reason that, this time it will be different?

I appreciated the stance the author took at introducing a character who was set apart yet, one who mutilated themselves in their own lies; a character one could be enticed to believe, trust, & hope for. Poor Odran with everyone offering him sandwiches when he wasn’t even hungry. Poor Odran whose father drowned his young brother in a murder-suicide. Poor Odran who finally made a friend only for this person to be a blatant mentally deranged ghoul. Poor Odran who is so like the other passengers on the train so as to melt into the fabric on the seat becoming who he was, no one man at all.