I greatly enjoy reading long, multi-volume, immersive novels: Marcel Proust – bien sür – , Elena Ferrante, and Thomas Mann. I also enjoy novellas, short books of fiction that might occupy around one hundred pages or less: Stefan Zweig – natürlich – , Françoise Sagan, and, again, Thomas Mann. Novellas are not so much immersive as paddling; but, despite their brevity, at their best they clearly signal something important about life. They have one point to make and they make it speedily.
Last year, a good friend gave me two novellas by Claire Keegan, a contemporary Irish writer. Although I read a reasonable amount of Irish fiction, I had not come across her work previously. When I started Small Things Like These (2022), I realised immediately that her writing was of the highest quality, as good as John McGahern (who is very, very good); and that the story she told was both difficult and important. Subsequently, I have read two more of her books, and discovered that they each share the rare quality of great literature, the ability to capture with some precision the complexities and tensions within normal human relationships, and the moral dilemmas that arise in our everyday lives.
Small Things Like These has recently been adapted for the screen, and last month I went with my daughter (also a fan of Keegan’s books) to see the movie, with Cillian Murphy in the starring role. It is a faithful recounting of the story, capturing well the feel of a small Irish town in the weeks leading to Christmas in the mid-1980s: the relentless cold and wet weather, the charms of carol singing in the town square, parental worries about their children and the family finances, the bonhomie of a busy pub, and the hard physical work of the labouring classes. Neither the book nor the film allows these charms to disguise or soften its main theme, which concerns the cruel treatment of children. But this is not a book/film about the suffering of the young, rather it is about how we adults respond to the fact of that suffering when we encounter it.
The decades-long role of the Irish church in the systematic, institutional abuse of young mothers, young children, and babies is no longer news; nor is the behaviour of the leaders of the Irish church in focusing their energies on covering up this abuse rather than ending it, and failing to support the state in bringing the perpetrators to justice. For many years there was official denial, obfuscation, delay, and excuse, but in the recent past, numerous stories of awful suffering have broken into the public sphere, and the Irish church has been damaged beyond repair.
When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in September 1979, it is estimated that 1.25 million people attended his mass in Dublin, out of a population of 3.3 million. In August 2018, when Pope Francis made the next papal visit, around 125 thousand people attended his mass in Dublin, out of a population of 4.9 million. (In the Roman army, when discipline was restored over mutinous troops by dragging 1 in 10 out of line to be executed, it was known as decimation. I do not know what the right term is when 9 out of 10 people walk away from the church, but that is the scale of secularization in Ireland over the past generation.)
Keegan’s book is not about what happened to poor young women who became pregnant outside of marriage, and who subsequently ended up in the “care” of the church. The scandal of the Magdalen Laundries has been told already. She is concerned instead with the question, why did this scandal continue for so long, when many people knew, or at least suspected, what was going on. Her protagonist – Bill Furlong, who runs a small business supplying coal to local houses, but also to the local Catholic convent – is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into direct contact with clear evidence of a young woman’s suffering at the hands of the church, and he is forced to decide what he should do in response. There is significant pressure exerted upon him – by the church authorities, by friends, and by family, to do nothing. He is but one man, with a great deal to loose, confronted by a national institution with power and influence over the future education of his own children and, potentially, the future viability of his own business. Facing an acute moral dilemma — and working his way through this dilemma on his own, with memory his chief resource — he acts recklessly for the good.
Forget James Bond, forget Jack Reacher, forget Lara Croft, and forget Marvel Comics: if you want to see heroism at the movies, Bill Furlong is your man.
Furlong is fictional. Real men are often cowards. I have been reflecting recently about a man I once knew, when I was in my late teens. Then, he was someone I admired. Now, only the fact that he is dead prevents me from telling him how disappointed I am: in him for his cowardice.
A few days ago, Justin Welby resigned as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church. I had never had much time for him. Back in 2013 he participated in a campaign against Wonga, the online credit provider, despite the fact that the Anglican church’s fund manager had invested in the company. This campaign – supported by a range of consumer groups, think tanks, and MPs – led to regulation which effectively shut down the provision of commercial sub-prime credit to millions of British customers, without any thought about what else they might do to fund their credit needs. It has, in my view, led to an increase in financial exclusion, an increase in poverty, and an increase in illegal money lending. You would think that – of all people – an archbishop would know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but in his case it appears not.
However, Welby was not forced to resign for his simplistic views about consumer finance. Rather, a recently published report — the conclusion of a five year review process – demonstrated that the Anglican church had failed to act upon clear evidence that one of its members had committed, over many years, abuse that was “prolific, brutal and horrific”; further, that some of those who were, or who became senior clergy, failed to inform the police of criminal acts of gross abuse by a member of the church. Some believe that Welby himself showed a lack of curiosity about, and a lack of responsibility for responding to well-documented evidence of physical cruelty, which was inflicted on teenage boys, groomed at an Evangelical summer camp that he himself had once been associated with.
The Makin Review, sets out in detail how the Trustees of a charitable trust that ran holiday camps for boys from exclusive UK private schools, became worried after hearing rumours that one of the camp’s leaders was inviting teenage boys he met on these camps back to his home, where he forced them to confess their sinful failings and then brutally beat them. The Trustees commissioned a review, from a leading Cambridge vicar, who identified and interviewed a number of victims and reported on the abuse they, and others, had suffered. His report was completed in 1982, but the Trustees made no report to the police. The Makin Review states that, “the recipients of that report participated in an active cover-up to prevent that report and its findings – including that crimes had been committed – coming to light. There is no good excuse or good explanation that justifies that decision.”
Instead, the Trustees pressured the abuser to leave the country, so that his behaviour would not become public, and so their charitable trust would avoid an embarrassing scandal. He moved to Zimbabwe, where he set up a new charity, running holiday camps for teenage boys, and for the next thirty years he continued his acts of physical abuse. The details in the report make for hard reading. In addition to the 26-30 young men who were victims in the UK, a further 85 victims in Zimbabwe have been identified. These figures exclude those who were “groomed”, but not abused. All this suffering, all this cruelty, was known about by some in the church for thirty years before, in 2013, the most senior leadership of the Anglican Church, including Welby, were officially informed. Even then, no serious response was forthcoming. Only a television documentary in February 2017 provoked action, including a police investigation. However, the abuser died in 2018 in South Africa, having never had to face the consequences of his crimes.
Denial, obfuscation, delay and excuse: the ecclesiastical playbook for the Catholic Church in Ireland turned out to work just as well for the Anglican Church in England and in Zimbabwe: shed a few tears for the victims while allowing the abusers and their accomplices in high office to hide from justice.
Reading the Makin Report, I discovered that one of the Trustees of the charitable trust, who in 1982 chose to keep silent, was the man who ran the church youth group that I attended in my teens. In those days I liked him, and found him more interesting and genuine than most of the other adults associated with the church. I find it hard to believe that he would have condoned the abuser’s activities, and I want to believe that he was appalled by what he read in the report. But all I know for sure is that when he was presented with the opportunity to do something to stop the abuse he kept silent. I have no idea whether he was pressured by more senior colleagues to look the other way, nor how he felt about his actions in the years following. I lost touch with him when I left home for college. Now he is dead and I cannot ask him why he behaved the way he did.
I cannot be sure what I would have done, had I been in his place. But I hope that I would been recklessly good.
Should Justin Welby want to reflect on a Biblical story about cruelty and betrayal, I would recommend to him Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers (1933-43). My English translation comes to just under 1.500 pages, which makes for a long read, but nowadays he has plenty of free time. Alternatively, he could turn to Claire Keegan’s 110 page novella, which spares us the detail of the criminal acts, but confronts us with the dilemma facing the eye-witness. Perhaps someone could explain to him the irony of her title: Justin, these are the really big things in life.