The God Squad

There have been so many novels about abuse that they seem glib compared with real life, writes Mick Heaney.

His experience had damaged him but, for a long time, Paddy Doyle resisted writing about it. In the late 1980s, Doyle was a budding scriptwriter who had tackled disability in his early works but had never faced up to the horrors that left him disabled. Institutionalised as a child after the death of his parents in the 1950s, Doyle had suffered such physical and sexual abuse at the hands of nuns that he ended up requiring brain surgery. Confined to a wheelchair, he had been unable to escape the legacy of his childhood, yet he tried to avoid the ghosts of the past.

”Then on day I sat down in front of the computer,” says Doyle. “I looked at it and I said: ‘I want to tell you something’. And I started typing. People said it must have been very cathartic and I always say, ‘You must be joking’. Because what you’re actually doing is rewinding the tape and reliving the whole business again. Especially if it’s autobiographical, you’ve to put yourself back into situations you’d rather not be in. I wondered whether anyone would care about it, so I would leave it only to come back [to it]. And The God Squad came out the other end.”

It may have been a struggle but, by writing about the abuse he suffered, Doyle made his name: The God Squad was a bestseller when it was published in 1988. The book also helped to change the Irish Literary landscape.

What started out as one man’s painful attempt to lay bare hidden crimes is now in danger of becoming a tired trope in Irish writing. Harrowing autobiographical tales have become ubiquitous in the years since The God Squad appeared and child abuse – be it domestic or clerical – has become a hot topic in the literary world. Doyle may have been unable to confront his demons in fictional form, but many Irish novelists have felt no such obstacles. In the process, a once searing subject has become mundane.

Skippy Dies, the new novel by Paul Murray, is the latest and most egregious example of the overexposure of child abuse in recent Irish fiction. Murray’s novel revolves around Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a mousy pupil at a fictional Dublin boarding school, who is buffeted by a futile romance, dysfunctional classmates and, yes, sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted authority figure.

Whereas Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was a louche comedy, Skippy Dies aims for something darker, in the form of ambiguous passages about its protagonist’s encounters with a creepy priest and a swimming coach. But given the schoolboy humour and the undergraduate philosophising that make up the rest of the novel, Murray’s exploration of such a sensitive subject looks like a botched effort at artistic significance.

Murray, however, is only following in the footsteps of more accomplished writers, notably Anne Enright, who won the Booker prize in 2007 with The Gathering, her claustrophobic novel of family abuse. William Trevor’s short story Men of Ireland, from his 2007 collection Cheating at Canasta, featured a priest who bristles at allegations of molestation of a former altar boy while paying him off; Patrick McCabe took a homicidal paedophile as a symbol of Ireland’s uneasy relationship with its past in his 2006 novel Winterwood; while Colm Tóibín’s collection of short fiction, Mothers and Sons, has two stories dealing with child abuse.
“Obviously, if you live in Ireland the issue of child abuse emerges strongly,” says Tóibín. “It is hard to leave it out. It comes in from the side for me, or sneaks in, rather than being the theme of anything I have published.”

Others take a more explicit approach. Last week the Abbey Announced a series of plays on child abuse: works include No Escape, a drama by journalist Mary Raftery drawing on the Ryan report, as well as James X by Mannix Flynn. Fiach Mac Conghail, the national theatre’s director, said the strand, entitled “The Darkest Corner, was intended to “investigate” the topic.

It could be argued that in writing about such a difficult subject, authors are living up to their reputation for intuiting the unsayable. Just as Joyce, Synge and O’Casey revealed the ambivalent truths beneath public pieties, so contemporary writers are throwing new light on a troubling issue. But in this case, Irish fiction is not saying anything original. Rather, literary novelists are following a path blazed by a less vaunted genre: the so-called “Misery memoir”.

Since the publication of Doyle’s book, memoirs about Irish childhoods blighted by abuse have become a publishing staple. The early 1990s produced Patrick Galvin’s Song for a Raggy Boy and Patrick Touhers’ Fear of the Collar. At that stage, writers had to tread carefully: a chapter about a Christian Brother who played classical music while he was abusing inmates at Artane industrial school was left out of the first edition of Touher’s book. “We thought there was a chance the Brothers would sue,” says Michael O’Brien of O’Brien Press, which has since published several memoirs.

As the revelations about child sexual abuse increased, within the church but also in areas such as the Irish swimming world, so too did the demand for such books. But while the scale of assaults made the issue a matter of public importance, the quality and quantity of memoirs being published looked suspiciously cynical.

“It’s a legitimate fear,” says O’Brien. “We’ve turned down loads of stories like that, there’s a limit. You have to balance the right of the public to know, you have to be sure they are authentic.” One book in particular, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne, discredited the genre; it turned out the author had never been at the Magdalene laundry where she was supposedly abused. “If that happens and it gets an awful lot of publicity, the general public is inclined to go, what’s going on here,” says Doyle.

Accordingly, even those with a vital story to tell have become wary of publishing. As a teen in 1980s County Wexford, Colm O’Gorman was repeatedly raped by Father Sean Fortune. A decade later, with the church failing to act on complaints about Fortune, O’Gorman reported him to the Gardaí (Irish police), leading to the priest’s arrest (he committed suicide in 1999) and the establishment of the Ferns inquiry. But while O’Gorman has been instrumental in the unravelling of the Catholic church’s power in Ireland, he was cagey about jumping on the bandwagon: having first been approached in 20003, he only published his memoir, Beyond Belief, last year.
“I couldn’t see the point in writing it and I didn’t want to tell the story just for the sake of telling the story,” says O’Gorman. “I resisted for nearly five years because I wanted to know what ideas I wanted to explore. I was aware it might be seen – and indeed has been seen – as another misery memoir.”

His book may be one of the genre’s swansongs, Publishers such as O’Brien think the market for “misery lit” has peaked. “Most of what needs to be said has been said,” says O’Brien. “I think there’s no point in just putting them out for entertainment.”

All of which highlights Irish fiction’s continuing attraction – and its feeble response – to the subject of child abuse. Enright’s book, for all its laurels, seemed like a typically parochial Irish family drama with an edgy, topical twist welded on. And Murray’s trivial treatment is best illustrated by the fact that his suspect priest is a French teacher by the name of Father Green, or Pére Vert.

Such a failure of imagination is unsurprising – the topic has defeated more talented writers. Tóibín attempted a novel about child abuse in the late 1990s, only to set it aside.

“The reason I abandoned the novel,” he says, “was that it dealt with abuse too directly and, while that worked in my head, on paper it seemed to exploit rather than explore the problem. There was nothing I could add that a journalist or a judge could not do better.”

Therein lies the problem for Irish Writers. So stark are the abuses laid out in the Murphy and Ryan reports that attempting to intuit a deeper meaning from them seems glib. It is a problem familiar to American novelists, who have struggled to engage with 9/11. Richard ford pointedly set his 2006 book, The Lay of the Land, the year before the attacks, letting it look in our subconscious.

It is an approach that the likes of Murray would do well to heed. Raking over child abuse for the sake of a story devalues the subject, at a time when it has become a more urgent issue than ever. “There’s a point where people are getting weary of it, and yet it’s all very real,” says Doyle. As we digest the enormity of the abuse scandals over the past two decades, the truth is so devastating there will be no room for fiction.

The Sunday Times: Culture Magazine. February 7th 2010