A History of Loneliness

This author is a guarantee for excellent Reading. The present title is no exception. Sincé many years I do not consider myself a Christian anymore, less a Catholic and Mr. Boyne does confirm my (un)believings with this book which describes the rotten system of the church in Ireland.

an interesting story, I think a bit over done and strident. Is the main character clueless or repressed? I was mad when I finished the book. Not sure if it was because I ultimately didn't like the story or because the author had me right where he wanted me.

The situations, characters and dialogues, especially in the beginning, are exciting, true, captivating. The structure is clever and the whole book engage you. There are few weak spots towards the end, situations and/or dialogues you won't find believable. Some things are over explained, which ruins an overall impression. But there are quite a few moments in the book that demonstrate John Boyne's writing superiority.

A very difficult read due to the subject matter. Well written and thought provoking but also depressing and dark. You cannot help but like the main character but he is guilty by association and his silence. Turning a blind eye is reprehensible. Glad I read it happy I am finished!

although described as a fictional book it is a very realistic look at a very shameful period in the history of the catholic church and the insight into what happens when a majority is deeply affected by the horrendous deeds of a minority. Again John Boyne gives us an excellent read.

The book was well written, but the subject matter (child molestation by clergy) was difficult and the main character infuriated me (He feigned ignorance of the molestation, but in reality, he just chose to ignore what he knew to be true.).

A bit too much polemic in the book - but understandably so given the author's own personal experience. I also found that the plot moved a bit slowly at times, with heavy hints repeated frequently of inevitable revelations. Having said that, it was overall a powerful treatment of a very painful subject.

He creates a very sympathetic main character in the kind, decent priest who only gradually realises the awfulness that has been going on around him. However it beggars belief that he could have been quite so naive, including the very powerful scene where he takes a lost child by the hand in a Dublin shop and tries to buy him ice cream - credible enough in earlier years, but not by 2011 for any priest (or any man at all of his age) who had lived in Ireland for the previous 20 years. But it was a very dramatic scene and contributed well to the story, which after all is fiction.

I was taken aback by inaccuracies in the background details - not that they would effect the impact of the book on readers who would be unaware of them, but struck me as sloppy. So the Metropole cinema, a major landmark in O'Connell Street for many decades, is said to be in Tara Steet. The Dublin to Wexford train is made go through Glendalough - no train does. The main character mentions that he made his first communion at the age of 9 - without comment as if was quite usual, when 7 was the norm. The posting of the paedophile priest to parishes all over the country would never have happened - all over a single diocese yes, perhaps on special assignment outside the diocese, but never to parishes in another diocese as each bishop has total control of his own.

But overall a powerful and interesting fictional take on a controversial episode in Irish and church history.

This memoir tells an important story: that of child sexual abuse committed by priests in the Catholic Church and the silence of those who could have stopped it. However, it did ramble in parts which detracted from its message.

A History of Loneliness dramatizes one priest’s determination to be a good man during a time when Ireland is rocked by revelations of sexual abuse by the clergy. John Boyne’s narrative follows Father Odran Yates as he leaps back and forth in time to tell his story, from his admission to the seminary as a teenager, to his complicity in enabling his classmate, Tom Cardle, to avoid the repercussions of his crimes against young men. Yates and Cardle are men who have found their long-held position in Irish society erode as challenges to traditional power have undermined the status of the Catholic Church.

Terrified of difference, seeking conformity, a few idealistic or resigned young men entered the seminary. Some found themselves pressured, in Tom’s case, to remain there despite their unfit nature for the priesthood. Boyne illustrates the demands placed on those channeled into the clerical system. He shows the indifference with which many were treated by their superiors in the hierarchy. As the Archbishop responds to the priest’s question in 2007 about Tom’s guilt in the crimes for which he is accused: “you can go back to your precious school and teach the little bastards about respecting the church.”

Yates reflects in 2013: “Of course the shades in my profession changed as one advanced through the ranks, from black to scarlet to white; darkness, blood, and a cleansing at the very top.”

Odran served the Vatican as a seminarian. Boyne creates a backstory for the younger Irishman set in 1978, the year of the three popes. This episode feels clever but melodramatic. It is engineered to account for the protagonist’s subsequent lack of rank in the Irish power structure.

There, Odran’s glimpses the Vatican’s corruption. Odran later senses a “darkness stirring” about his own fault. “I had seen things and I had suspected things and I had turned away from things and I had done nothing.” He debates how to treat Tom. “If I cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come to an end, what kind of a priest am I anyway? What kind of man?” Father Odran strives for decency. But he has done so too quietly. He has been spared many of the torments of some of his sexually frustrated or temperamentally warped colleagues. Yet, he suffers, as this novel shows.

The fall of the Church from grace has received belated scrutiny by journalists and historians. Now, Irish fiction incorporates its dispiriting impacts. A History of Loneliness addresses this timely, sad theme.

Odran Yates has always felt comfortable in his role as a priest. He likes teaching the boys at Terenure College and he loves taking care of the school library. When one day the Archbishop tells him that he has to move to another parish to fill in for his old friend Tom, Odran only accepts reluctantly and he starts to notice that the Catholic church isn’t the same institution he once thought it to be.

In A History of Loneliness, we follow Odran and the Catholic church through a crisis. In the course of the book, Odran reflects on his difficult past that influenced his becoming a priest. We meet lots of different characters, many with their own crosses to bear. Even though we only get to know them through Odran’s eyes, some of these characters are crafted so vividly you can almost see through them.

I never thought that a book about a priest could actually be that gripping and emotional. Unfortunately, the ending wraps up too neatly for my taste. If you can stomach a literary punch in the gut that will broaden your horizon in regard to the Catholic church, I recommend you read A History of Loneliness.

The events unfolding over the last five years concerning sexual abuse has seen the emergence of a bitter and enraged public calling for justice to be seen to be done and to be done with immediate effect. What has made this all the more shocking is the naming of celebrities who were to many of us cherished and household names, and whose downfall was all the more dramatic. It is impossible to believe that the signs of such abuse were not present or noticed at an earlier time, the fact is it was always there and out of fear or misguided loyalties was simply ignored. In this mishmash of deceit and lies the church (and in particular the catholic church) presented itself as the face of salvation and hope when in reality it's clergy were some of the greatest perpetrators

Ordan Yates is a priest and had always wanted to be a priest since he received "the calling" at an early age. He accepts the ceremony, the conformity, the celibacy and dedicates his life to a greater being knowing whatever the pain, whatever the trial it is god's will. We travel with him back and forth from days of his youth, his intern at college, his administering to the holy pontiff during his time in Rome. We learn of the tragedy in his life; the death of his younger brother Cathal at the hands of his father William, and the demise of his beloved sister Hannah cruelly stricken with dementia from a relatively early age. He accepts with fortitude his vocation basking in the knowledge that he has the love of his young nephews Janus (now a successful author) and young Aidan. He has always been close with this childhood friend Tom Cardie but has pondered and wondered why it is that he is constantly on the move from parish to parish.

I was aware that A History of Loneliness concerned the sexual abuse of young boys when under the guardianship of those they always felt they could trust, the priests and elders of the church. John Boyne does a wonderful job of telling a difficult story and gradually introducing doubt into the mind of the reader. This must be akin to the reality of what actually occurred, the refusal to confront those in power and the inability to accept what the eyes saw but the mind did not question. In this respect and indeed in this story no one is blameless for that moment of hesitation, that moment of questioning what you refused to believe resulted in the destroyed and decimated lives of many young people. Father Yates was to make one such mistake that had devastating and far reaching consequences.

This is a wonderful story, told with such depth of feeling and a true understanding of the subject matter being explored. I cannot say how glad I was that I read, even though at times the outcome was heart breaking. Boyne successfully portrays the catholic church as an institution more concerned with its own reputation and place in the community rather than protecting the vulnerable and young, the very people who looked to God as love and his workers the priests his guardians. Highly Recommended.

The clerical abuse of minors seems to have deep roots in Ireland. John Boyne's novel "A History of Loneliness" depicts a national Church life where such ecclesiastical crime could become institutionalized: from the perpetrators themselves to craven bishops to priests of unremarkable courage or common sense. At ground zero we have the story of one priest, Odran Yates. Boyne's biographical sketch of Yates takes us back to the cleric’s early childhood, where an unthinkable tragedy halves his family, and leads his mother to the delusion that her son is called to the priesthood. Like many a young boy before and probably since, Yates at the tender age of nine is pre-ordained by an overbearing mother, canonical consent issues be damned.

The vetting process for teenage boys entering Irish seminaries in 1973 was remarkably loose, judging from Yates’ classmates. Yates himself is hardly a poster child of maturity. He is somewhat of a loner, socially awkward, and cloyingly naive or uncritical, factors that will not serve him well as he progresses through seminary and clerical life. In the seminary he has one “friend, if that is the word, with Tom Cardle. In many respects it is an imbalanced marriage of convenience. Cardle is a misfit, a depressed and angry young man, the victim of physical abuse at the hands of his father, someone with nowhere else to go. Cardle and Yates seem to hit it off primarily because neither is a Dubliner.

One of the most puzzling and improbable turns of plot is what might be called “Yates’ Roman adventure.” In one of the more improbable episodes in this story the nondescript Yates is assigned to Rome for a year's study, where he becomes the papal attendant, assisting the pope in his bed chambers in the early morning and late evening. It is 1978, the "year of three popes" as some may remember. It is also the year that our candidate for ordination embarks on a highly dysfunctional Roman la dolce vita episode that leaves the reader to wonder if our hero’s psyche is even more damaged than we first believed.

Yates returns to the familiar confines of Ireland for ordination with Cardle, and the two set off on entirely different clerical tracks. Yates settles in to comfortable Terenure College, a Catholic boys’ school where he serves as librarian. His only real link to “normal people” is an affable relationship with his sister and a dutiful one with his mother. Cardle for his part proceeds to parish work and quickly establishes the clerical assignment pattern we have unfortunately come to recognize in our own country, the brief tenures and rapid transfers.

Yates’ comprehension of this is limp. There are times when the reader would like to smack him on the side of the head for his insufferable density and lack of common sense to see how his diocese and national church are changing under his feet. Perhaps he is preoccupied with changes in his own family, but soon that family will become victims of Yates’ blindness or unwillingness to accept the plain evidence of the evils around him.

Yates will eventually hit bottom himself as the reluctant co-conspirator with his cardinal bishop in yet another Cardle shuffle. I would like to say that there is a “Saul to Damascus” awakening moment for the work’s main character, but there are some glimmers of hope as when he blackmails the cardinal’s successor into getting an assignment he wants. He makes peace—or at least connection—with one abuse victim he could have saved. At some level he accepts the now-convict Cardle’s rant that Yates had really known the score all along, an element of truth from a bizarre source. But his penchant for doing the stupid gets him into multiple difficulties even in his late 50’s, and one is left to wonder what becomes of a man who can say little good about himself as he approaches seniority.

I have to be honest that “A History of Loneliness” does not measure up to Edwin O’Connor’s 1961 classic “The Edge of Sadness.” Both works treat of broken priests at mid-life, but O’Connor delves into the stirrings of his subject’s dilemma with what I would call a psychological deftness. John Boyne depends too much upon externals—from child abuse to papal intrigue—and gives the reader very little meat on the bones until a rather prolonged and stunning concluding dialogue.

It may be, however, that Father Odran Yates was created as a kind of corporate figure, an analogy for his country’s clergy who plodded through a business as usual church existence and chose to look the other way through the last half-century. If that is the case, then what we have is a historical commentary of a tragic time. The empty psyche of Yates becomes a pilgrim through an age of shame. I should note that Boyle is the author of the stunning “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” and certainly has established his bona fides as a narrator of ugly times. So long as the reader understands the nature of the journey, this work is a worthy undertaking.

Although classified as a novel, A HISTORY OF LONELINESS is really a collection of stories, told out of order, that focuses on the heart of a benevolent yet conflicted man. Odran Yates, an Irish priest, suffers tragedy in his family life and corruption while serving as the chaplain at a Dublin boys' school.

Through our own already established notions, we understand more than is ever said. And the subtleties presented here are masterful. Author John Boyne chooses to keep the focus on the ramifications of what such things do to both the victims and those around them. We see the effects, not the acts themselves --- a closed door or a hand on a shoulder lets our imagination do the work, and through this we are given a haunting and beautiful novel.

In one scene, Odran spots a young boy lost in a department store and escorts him outside to where he is told the child's mother is. Odran is a good man, but what he represents is perceived to be corrupt. The witnesses don’t know him, but they recognize that he’s a church man and are aware of what some priests have done. It’s an isolating experience for Odran, who has good values and grew up believing in the church, but is seen at face value by his white collar. Consequently, he is arrested and taken into custody for abducting the boy.

This incident takes place in 2011 and follows a chapter set nearly 40 years earlier in 1973. That is the beauty of Boyne’s novel, as each chapter takes us into another place in time in the life of Odran Yates. Going back farther to 1964, we learn that Odran’s father quits his job and pursues an acting career, only to fail miserably and then take to drinking. The scenes here are beautiful and reminiscent of such great works as James Agee’s A DEATH IN THE FAMILY in their poetic stature and frank openness of death. They’re also heartbreaking in their hope, which soon gets dashed as Odran’s father comes to a fateful end and the family structure soon breaks.

Following his father’s decline, Odran’s mother becomes devoutly religious, and thus it is decided that Odran must become a priest. This is in 1972, after Odran, then a shy, naive youth, ends up with a girl in his bedroom. The remedy, his mother decides, is a visit from an old and abrasive priest, Father Haughton. This man of the cloth digs into Odran, getting him to admit that he liked being with a girl and interrogating him to tears. The heavy-handedness reaches to intimidation as Odran faints under the fear. It’s a powerful scene in a novel filled with moving moments. It is then decided by his mother that his vocation will be the priesthood, at which point he is shipped to a seminary school at Clonliffe College, where he begins his studies.

Odran is a soft-spoken and sympathetic character, yet is frozen by contradictions in keeping true to his devout life as a priest and doing what is just to help those who are hurt. He leads with his heart, having fierce opinions on priesthood and how it should be viewed. When the reputation of the church sullies good men such as himself, he inwardly becomes uneasy yet still internalizes --- numbed by guilt, and then failing to take action. If anything, he soaks in feelings, as he relates “The guilt. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt…” over seeing his friend, Tom Cardle, beaten, his father fade, the corruption of the church, and, finally, the broken hopes of those he loves.

From Odran’s life as a young boy to witnessing his sister's descent into nothingness after the tragic death of her husband, to his life in seminary, assistance to the pope and up-front corruption of his life’s institution, it all adds up to a superb novel. A HISTORY OF LONELINESS is a haunting and heartfelt account, relaying the strong inner emotions of one’s life. It is a surreal and beautiful journey through times that feel familiar yet fresh, but is also inexplicably sad in its handling of missed actions and painful reminiscing of realized mistakes. To read it is to become fully engrossed in the life of one man. What we learn through Boyne's work is that the silence of just one man can be the difference between a life lived and a life broken.

Reviewed by Stephen Febick.

Father Odran Yates, the first-person narrator of his life-story, is a pleasantly attractive protagonist. Intelligent, polite, and proud of his vocation as a Catholic priest, he describes a life filled with many small satisfactions, the usual Irish family heartaches, and only one significant failure. He is of course a believer, but the book neither drips with religiosity nor steeps itself in Catholic dogma; Father Yates manages to look at the more extreme manifestations of his calling with a healthy detachment, and this agnostic reader liked him for it. The most exciting year of his life is 1978, when as a final-year seminarian in Rome, he is honored with the job of sleeping outside the Pope's door in the Vatican, to bring him in his late-night tea and early-morning coffee. An unusual year, too, in that he serves three different pontiffs: Paul VI, the short-lived John Paul I, and the Polish John Paul II. After his ordination, Father Yates returns to Dublin, takes up a teaching position at Terenure College, and is assigned to parish work only in his mid-fifties.

"Sometimes it's like I went to bed in one country and woke up in another." This is another character speaking, but it might well apply to the whole book. One of the most brilliant things that John Boyne does is to tell his story out of sequence: the chapters dot around in years between 1965 and 2013, but there is no confusion whatever; Odran's past, present, and future fit together as naturally as real lives do. But, told in this way, the story kept me on the edge of my seat, each new revelation appearing like a clue in a mystery. And by juxtaposing the then with the now, it demonstrates the huge changes that come over the Catholic Church in Ireland during that half-century. When he travels on a crowded train on his return from Rome, Father Odran is besieged by people offering their seats or buying him snacks from the dining car; when he walks into a cafe in Dublin in 2006, he is treated almost as a pariah. The change is partly due to the gradual modernization of Ireland, but more to the sexual abuse scandals that broke in the 2000's.

Boyne does not taint Odran with any of this directly. So far from fondling altar boys, it is hinted early on that his one significant fall from grace involved a woman. To be honest, this affair, when it finally comes out, is the least convincing thing in the book, but it serves its purpose. It enables Boyne to build a subtle mesh of clues as to what is going on, in Odran's peripheral vision so to speak, without touching him directly in any way. And when he does become involved, it is again in subtle and unexpected ways, but utterly devastating.

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I found myself wondering about John Boyne's own background.* He seems to know about the workings of the Catholic Church, but then it would be hard not to, growing up in Ireland. If he was raised Catholic, it would seem that he is now lapsed; there is very little about personal faith in this novel. He respects the priesthood as an institution, but he is vicious in condemning the hierarchy that allowed abuses to happen and covered them up. The Archbishop of Dublin with whom Father Yates comes into contact is a fictional figure, although his real-life counterpart was also disgraced by the scandals. The Popes that Odran serves, however, are the real people. Boyne clearly has a very low opinion of John Paul II, whom he describes as an out-and-out misogynist. But his portrait of the "smiling pope," John Paul I, is tinged with real affection and is one of the warm spots that temper the growing outrage of this brilliantly constructed, but totally human, novel.

*Aha! See first comment.

At first glance, the more with 'mis lit' and rage over paedophilia being very popular book topics in Ireland, one may miss the bleak but nuanced perspective that (the main character) Odran Yates presents in his recollections. He himself, indirectly but intensely, has been ruined by a paedophile. Tom, the priest guilty of many incidents of such a crime, is Odran's contemporary and close friend for many years, and there is no physical contact between the two. Tom has the paedophile's dangerous ability for manipulation, and manages to destroy Odran's image of his own integrity, vocation, and honesty, cunningly mixing a sociopath's ability to exert power over others with deceit that refers to the truth, just enough to crush the hearer. The utterly bleak, hopeless image the reader sees of the Irish Church shows us a host of characters who all, directly or, more often, indirectly, have been victims of paedophiles.
Odran Yates, a middle-aged priest who entered the seminary at 16, shows no wickedness - and actually has a degree of innocence, largely undetectable through his brusque and remote manner, which makes him highly vulnerable. None of the characters in this book are likeable, nor do they show any real love or dedication to others, the Church, or their vocations, and Odran is no exception. Odran is intellectually gifted, but rude, nasty, short-tempered, and possessed of a remoteness that is not related to contemplation or intellectual focus. As one example, the reader learns, early in the action, that Odran has no struggles with celibacy - not because of virtue, commitment, or channelling energy into charity, but because he 'does not want to be bothered.' He cannot rightly be called lonely, because his remoteness is his own choice. There is no passion in Odran, save for guilt and anger. He fits neatly into the seminary and priesthood, and his hopes for being there for others (much as he prefers long-dead authors whose books he shelves to the here and now) tend to amount to meeting obligations and brushing off such problems as he does encounter.
Though I am not from Ireland, I was educated by Irish priests and nuns (none of them criminals!), and was able to see the peculiarly Irish brand of Catholicism which is illustrated in various characters (though, for all of their many works in that nation, no religious Sisters appear in this book.) There indeed is truth in the waffling bishops' assertion that the majority of the clergy are decent, and that the Church accomplished outstanding good. Yet we do not 'get to know' any sincere, dedicated clergy in this book - and this shows us the tragic narrowness of perspective in which revelation of the 'cover ups' of abuse have resulted.
Odran and his contemporaries, born in the 1950s, were 'on the cusp' of massive, confusing changes in the church. The respect for the 'hero priest' which he sees during the 1970s are long gone from 1990s onwards, and, though Odran is not an appealing character, anyone could understand his frustration, with the constant fear of every word and action, and suspicion of every priest in sight. The first archbishop with whom Odran speaks, when he is assigned to his first parish after a quarter of a century in a school library, is crude, narrow, possibly racist, but unable to see the distinction between 'old school' tactics of fearing that 'bad example' will decrease the power of the church (in charitable works, and political influence intended to guard morality), and sheltering criminals who go on to do further damage in new assignments. Odran's old friend, Tom, is the priest he is replacing, and it appears the bishop thinks Odran is being cunning when he protests that Tom, who has been endlessly moved from place to place, never has the chance to demonstrate abilities as a parish priest, because he never is in one place long enough. Until Tom is one of those arrested - a sexual predator - Odran actually has no knowledge of his being a paedophile. He ends up in the situation in which many clergy found themselves. He is assumed to have known all along - the more because they were close friends - where a combination of remoteness and innocence left him blind. He sympathised with Tom, who came from a horrid family background, and whose father insisted he enter the priesthood, because, as Tom tells Odran in youth, it would be 'safer.'
The first archbishop stresses that Tom's reputation must not be damaged, lest the Church be brought down by 'an attention-seeking child.' The later archbishop, who avoids questions and mouths such pieties as 'God works in mysterious ways' when he is interviewed about the convicted paedophiles by RTE, appears to be a fool on a grand scale. Odran becomes a walking mass of guilt - no insight, passion, joy, struggle over ideals - as a broken man who has had a paedophile friend manipulate him into seeing no good or honesty in himself.
Odran is at once a nasty, detached man and, in many ways, an innocent child. His mother's 'knowledge' that he had a priestly vocation, which comes to her when she becomes hugely devout after her husband and infant son's death, seems to be discernment - and, since Odran finds priestly life suited to his nature, he accepts his vocation without ever exploring it on a deep level. He ultimately hates himself for not seeing there were paedophiles and their victims in his background, yet he is so devoid of any inclination to become involved with others' situations that he could not have been capable of this. The few 'scandals' in his own life (none of a sexual nature) border on the pathetic, because they show someone who, in various areas, has the maturity of an adolescent. There seems to be a parallel, of which few of us would think, when a boy in secondary school, where there is great emphasis on rugby, tells Odran that, where teens in 'regular' schools graduate with their lives just beginning, the Catholic school boys, who are very well-educated and perhaps rugby champions, have a sense that the best of their lives are over.

A History of Loneliness is a cut above the many popular 'mis lit' books about paedophilia and abuse in Ireland, because it has a subtlety which grows on the reader as one proceeds to explore the elements on which Odran reflects.

This novel relates the top-to-bottom decay in the Catholic Church as seen from an imperfect bystander, a priest who walked straight ahead and who was too afraid to connect the dots.

But really, this is about "the history of loneliness" in general, albeit situated within the realm of the Church. Each character in this book has his or her own aching, crippling pain -- from the protagonist's father and family to the medley of those in the church. Everybody's in it together but ultimately alone.

Boyne adeptly brings that fact home throughout this remarkably well-written story. The writing is smart, and one needs to pay attention. I will definitely seek out this author again.

This is an incredibly powerful story about the abuse of children in Ireland by priests in the Catholic Church. It is a scandal which rocked the Church to its very foundations and ensured that the power wielded by this religious institution will never again go unchallenged. In the past, for hundreds of years, the priests had been treated as mini-gods by their congregants. Catholic mothers flung their young sons into the priesthood as pawns to "buy their way to Heaven". As with Odran Yates, whose mother assured the boy that he had a vocation; parents all over Ireland insisted that at least one of their sons should enter the Church. It was considered a mark of great distinction and holiness to boast of a priest in the family. Meanwhile "all was rotten in the state of Denmark"(or in this case Ireland). It was well-known within the Church that boys (and girls) were being abused by many of the parish priests. There were attempts at a massive cover-up when cases of abuse came to light - those involved ranged from lowly young priests right up to the Holy Father, the Pope. It had been well recorded for years that this abuse was taking place, but nobody in the Church hierarchy had the courage to report this to the relevant authorities. Abusive priests, bishops and cardinals, for all were involved, were either moved to other parishes (ensuring more children would be abused) or were sworn to silence.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And like so many of his fellow churchmen, Odran Yates closed his eyes and did nothing. And many children grew up with terrible psychological problems, or committed suicide, due to this abuse. I trust the Catholic Church leadership can live with this and will be prepared to spend Eternity in Hell for their sins.
Highly recommended.

Author John Boyne tackles a difficult subject in A HISTORY OF LONELINESS. But he does it in a masterful way. The book is thought provoking while also tragic and at times difficult to read. The author raises the question of everyone's responsibilities for things that happened in the Church. Boyne clearly hates the Catholic Church and he really seems to hate Ireland - although according to his biography he continues to live there.

This is not a happy book. It's a real downer in many ways. But the author weaves the tale through a series of flash backs that he brings together at the end.

If you liked the movie DOUBT, this book is right down your alley.

"A History of Loneliness" a novel by John Boyne will probably upset my Catholic friends, but I was fascinated by this story about a good Irish priest before, during and after the scandals of priests accused of sexually abusing boys which rocked the Church. Father Yates, like many priests, was encouraged to become a priest by his mother who kept insisting he had a calling, which he accepted that he did; although he comes to realize not all of his fellow priests had the same calling. Years later his seminary roommate and friend Tom Cardle is accused in court by several young men accusing him of molesting them. Yates is in disbelief for most of the book, until he realizes Cardle may have molested Yates's own nephew. The book paints an ugly picture of higher ups in the Church participating in coverups, more concerned for the accused priests than the children who were abused. A chilling book. 5 stars!

If readers have not discovered the contemporary Irish writers
they are missing great books. There is something about these Irish books.
Most take place in small villages. The times are innocent and the people are real.
The sites of these books remind me of the 50s in America.
This book by John Boyne stands right up there with the wonderful books written by
Sebastian Barry, and John McGahern. There is a feel about all of the Irish books that I do not
find in American literature. The writing is beautiful, the people, the atmosphere and the stories
are real. There is the quaint feel of foreign, yet close enough to America to make the reading easy.
"A History of Loneliness" has all of the previously mentioned characteristics but a new slant on life as a Catholic.
Father Odran is a reluctant priest but a truly good man. We first meet him at age 17 and we follow his life through
to old age.. The book gives great insight into the scandal of child sexual abuse by priest. You see and read about
abuse from inside the church. You suffer through the denials and cover ups. All are excellent characters and I
will long remember Father Odran.

The author does a masterful job of moving back and forth between time frames of the main subject's life to slowly and, at times, excruciatingly, peel back the fetid layers of the despicable rotten onion of pedophilia. Anyone who believes they can dodge the consequences when they choose to cloak themselves in loneliness to avoid confronting, and stopping, an ongoing horror needs to read this book. It shakes the foundations of trust, honor and faith when those edifices are rotten, as they certainly were during the time frame of the book. A very interesting "what if" concerning the untimely death of Pope John Paul the first - I won't give it away, but it makes the reader think how things could have been different if that Pontiff led the church for more than a month. I hated, despised, and was revolted by the subject matter. But I loved the book.

As I was reading this engrossing book I was amazed that it seemed to have little plot and was more like a character study. As I look back on it I see the plot development quite clearly. I find that discrepancy quite fascinating and wonder at how that is so like the lives we live - as we live each day we cannot clearly see the plot of our own lives, but looking back on our own histories, I think we can. I was not so concerned with the revelations about the Catholic Church as I was about the slow awakening of Yates to the truths he had been hiding from. It does seem he lived within his own little world within the enclosed world of the Church. What did interest me about the Church was the bit about his experience in the Vatican. I highly recommend this book.

Sadness and melancholy are the highpoints in John Boyne’s finely written novel titled, A History of Loneliness, that takes on the topic of child abuse by Irish priests. Protagonist Odran Yates is an Irish priest who was not an abuser, but he was close by and oblivious as it was done under his nose, by a priest friend and classmate. Boyne moves back and forth in time as he constructs Yates’ growing awareness of his own complicity in what happened over decades. Boyne’s prose will please those readers who enjoy literary fiction. His sensitivity to the victims of abuse constrains the novel in all the right ways. The essential loneliness in the lives of celibate priests pervades the narrative and creates the gloomy atmosphere in which the plot develops.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

Boyne gives the story of pedophilia in the priesthood the complexity it deserves. Evil actions don't arise out of nowhere. They have been handed down, from one generation to the next. And the blind eyes are willful.

What an incredible book. I recommend that as many people as possible read this book. Beneath the story is the all -present and never answered question of: IF WE SEE SOMETHING, EITHER CONSCIOUSLY OR SUBCONSCIOUSLY, THEN MUST WE DO SOMETHING?. The book addresses current questions about the priesthood, though there are no easy or close to easy ways to deal with the problem of what kind of people tend to go into the priesthood and the ever-present problem of sexual abuse between priests and young children who do not realize what is happening to them. This book does not in any way diminish people who go into the priesthood because of their religious beliefs.

I am not sure why,, but I love reading Irish authors. This Irish author, John Boyne, is, to me, an incredible author. Nancy S

Emotional and powerful, a compelling story with no easy answers to a very disturbing issue within the Catholic Church. I was completely involved in the story and the heartbreaking lives of the characters. John Boyne is one of my favorite authors. ( I also loved "The Absolutist") This is a great book, but it may be a difficult subject for some.

Probably the most distressing book I read in 2015 and I have highly recommended to all my friends. John Boyne knows his characters well and tells a story that we all are familiar with now. Like the movie "Spotlight", Boyne has explored a topic we know too well.
You will remember this book long after you've read the last pagel

John Boyne attempts to enlighten us on the Irish priest pedophile scandal using a virgin priest who has never touched a boy as his protagonist. The priest's best friend is one of the worst molesters, yet we are to believe that Fr.Odran Yates knew nothing all those years. But he's no innocent himself. We are expected to believe that he is post-seminary a low level assistant to Pope John Paul 1, yet strangely absent the night the pope died. Why? He was busy with a hot prowl burglary! Yes, he has taken a fancy to a woman, stalked her, and finally broke into her home while she was there!!! Yes, the author puts this forth as a credible scenario! It's left without explanation afterward, with no behavior like that ever again. The novel is otherwise boring until its final pages. One reason for this is because the author will not tell the story in a linear fashion. He's all over the place. Characters who are dead in one paragraph are suddenly alive in the next as we bounce around in time. For the nitty gritty of the scandal, the author does a good job of invoking the denials and the damages done by this horrendous behavior. Had that level of interest prevailed throughout the novel, it would have been great.

There are a few things you should know before tackling this book. First, it’s a novel that spans the period of 1964 to the present and takes place mostly in Ireland. The writer is Irish and most of the characters are Irish. Secondly, the protagonist Odran Yates is a Catholic priest and the plot deals with Catholic families in Ireland and the evil things that some priests do to children under their care.
In his early life Odran is one in a family of five. One fine day his father decides to make a trip to the beach with one of his sons. A twist of fate has the dad picking the younger boy named Cathal for this excursion and the harrowing scene that follows shows them both drowning in the sea. In some perverse way of coping with this tragedy, Odran’s mother believes that Odran must now study for the priesthood as some kind of retribution for this terrible event. And so, he obeys his mother but does not actually feel this vocation.
Once Odran enters the seminary he shares a room with another fellow named Tom Cardle and they become lifelong friends. During his own lefetime Odran will be a parish priest, a librarian, and will spend time in Rome as an “assistant” to the pope. His duties in that last case will be very similar to a waiter, supplying the Holy Father with tea and snacks when he first wakes in the morning and just before he retires in the evening. Odran’s career as a priest and his various assignments cause him to meet and work with Tom Cardle once again. Tom seems to have a problem settling in at a parish for a length of time and he is often transferred to another one by his bishop under increasingly adverse circumstances. Odran has suspicions that Tom is engaged in some evil business with boys under his care but does not report his fear to the Gardai (police). Only years later the ugly truth comes out. Tom is imprisoned and is no longer a priest. Odran is torn with grief when he learns about this and wonders if he should have done something much earlier to preclude this terrible outcome.
There are some scenes in this book that are very difficult to read because they mirror the actual events of the Catholic church in Ireland as well as other countries. But fair play to author John Boyne for his dexterity and talents in writing about an unpleasant subject with grace and compassion.