When Odran Yates entered the priesthood in the 1970s, Catholicism ruled Ireland with an iron fist. times have changed. When we meet him, Yates is 57 and lonely, struggling to find any self-respect or sense of purpose. He's witnessed the demise of both his personal status and that of the Catholic church over four decades as revelations of the sexual abuse of children within the organisation have proliferated. Though abuse was often common knowledge, it was regularly ignored and denied across Ireland, and the corruption made its way into the corridors of power in Rome. Boyne uses his narrator's guilty voice as a metaphor for the Irish people and the novel as a parable: abuse of power only happens because everybody becomes complicit.
This is the first novel Boyne has set in his native Ireland but it appears in part to have backfired on him: too often the prose descends into cliche. There is one scene, for example, when the Pope begins to sing a melancholic Irish ballad to Odran as he serves him tea in the Vatican. It feels like a scene out of Father Ted, minus the humour. It's a shame this weakness drags the novel down, because the writing for the most part is excellent and the story is mapped out with skill. With a more disciplined editor – who might have encouraged Boyne to restrain his narrator's voice a little – this could have been moulded into an incredible piece of work.
