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.
Continue reading »
