Faith and failure

FICTION: The Bishop's Man, By Linden MacIntyre, Cape, 399pp. £12.99

SECRETS, sinister and otherwise, as well as a lengthy collection of communal regrets, sustain this dark, compelling, often claustrophobic but always convincing narrative drawing on one of the most unrelenting of news stories. Linden MacIntyre won the 2009 Giller Prize, Canada's major literary award, with The Bishop's Man. It is, as its title suggests, about the scandals that have undermined the Catholic Church and the faithful throughout the world. Yet this novel is about more than abuse: it is a story of human failure and self-doubt.

Duncan MacAskill, the narrator, is a priest approaching 50 who has spent his career cleaning up messes. Less concerned with victims than with moving perpetrators beyond the contact of the police and journalists, he is resourceful and, as is obvious from the outset, preoccupied with keeping his own past at bay.

An element of rueful hindsight gives the narrative a deliberate, reflective tone. Here is a man familiar with compromise: “I was a priest in a time that is not especially convivial towards the clergy. I had, nevertheless, achieved what I believed to be a sustainable spirituality and an ability to elaborate upon it with minimal cant and hypocrisy. I had even, and this is no small achievement, come to terms with a certain sordid obscurity about my family origins in a place where people celebrate the most tedious details of their personal ancestry.”

The hazily squalid circumstances of his birth are one thing; MacAskill also has the legacy of his actions gnawing away at his sense of self. But he has learned to keep his inner thoughts at a distance – a useful device, as his professional responsibilities are complex and controlled by masters with their own secrets.

MacIntyre has a background in broadcast journalism, and at times the narrator sounds as if he is on trial. Isolation and loneliness quickly emerge as major themes: “The priest in question and his young housekeeper had become a source of local gossip. I do remember that she had a pretty face with warm, frightened eyes and a full mouth that trembled when I asked her if Father was in.”

Yet he quickly establishes his exact intentions. “But mostly I remembered the culprit’s attitude. It was his smugness, his unspoken sense of superiority. It was his obvious certainty that he’d transcended the lies and postures that had trapped the rest of us, we lesser priests, in our barren inhumanity. I’ve heard and seen it all many times since then.”

Recalling that he remarked to the offender that his housekeeper seemed “to be putting on weight”, MacAskill then adds: “I think I arranged a period of reflection in Toronto and he was gone in a few weeks. I persuaded her to lie low for a while. Life is full of temporary absences, I told her. It was that simple.”

MacAskill is caught between dealing with his latest move, from a post as a chaplain at a university to working in a small rural community very close to where he was raised. It is now impossible to keep the past at a distance. And then there is that other memory, a persistent one, apparently romantic, if not overly honourable.

There is no doubt that, with its wealth of case-history-like revelations, The Bishop's Mancould have faltered into heavy-handed polemic, but it doesn't. MacIntyre places a large cast of damaged characters around MacAskill, including his immediate superior, Mullins, a powerful study of the deviousness of survival who shares many strong scenes with MacAskill; the grieving parents of a handsome young son who had been subjected to an experience that is never quite specified help establish a true sense of the Nova Scotia in which most of the action is set.

Time and again MacIntyre demonstrates the effectiveness of never revealing too much. MacAskill is candid, drinking far too much, and inhabits a guilt that has become part of him; he is lonely and soon attracts Stella (admittedly the least-plausible creation). Their exchanges account for the weakest writing, but MacIntyre more than compensates elsewhere for these awkward lapses. It is a novel with screenplay potential, particularly the dialogue and setting. MacAskill’s divorced sister, Effie, has a complicated love life cleverly mirroring the many compromises that dictate the narrative and life itself. Her child, a grown daughter named Cassie, is a journalist, a detail that fits too neatly into supplying some useful information.

If the narrative can seem at times to be overly plotted, MacIntyre counters this with the understated way he evokes daily life in a place where nothing much now happens, probably because the characters are still dealing with the weight of their collective pasts.

Reasonable, depressed MacAskill wants to get through each day, but he also wants a bit more, a sense of release from his former life, and lives. If he seems at times to have wandered in from a Graham Greene novel, it is always as more than mere pastiche. In an excellent scene in which old Fr Mullins, a well-seasoned drinker, reminisces about the love for Poland his meeting with Pope John Paul II instilled in him, MacAskill then quizzes him about a decision the older man had made when blocking a choice of funeral music made by the parents of the young man who killed himself, convinced he had no future.

“They wanted Chopin at the funeral last month but you vetoed him in favour of some fiddle player.”

The old priest’s reply speaks volumes. “Oh, that . . . Everything has its place.” Mullins had intended to rename the local harbour in honour of the young man as a way of deflecting a political decision; his every gesture testifies to an astute reading of the world.

The Bishop's Man, longlisted for the 2011 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, is a strong novel, driven by its narrator's remorse and fragile hopes. Above all it makes powerful use of its setting at the outer edges of Canada. MacAskill watches the changing skies, the light and darkness, as closely as he studies the faces of those around him, and responds to the relentless shadows.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times