Photograph: Dani Pozo

Review

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne review – a denunciation of the Catholic church

The story of a guilty priest and the church's cover-up of sexual abuse makes for a lacerating portrait of Irish society

Helen Dunmore

Fri 3 Oct 2014 08.59 BST

"Ireland is rotten. Rotten to the core. I'm sorry, but you priests destroyed it." These words are spoken by a young man who was sexually attacked in his childhood by an Irish priest, a friend of the family. They go to the heart of this novel's passionate denunciation of the role played by the Catholic church in the scandal over child abuse by the clergy. It is a study of the corrupting effects of power in an Ireland that came close to being a theocracy. Sexuality was strictly governed; contraception, abortion and divorce were forbidden; and yet the abuse of children went unpunished and was deliberately concealed by the church hierarchy for fear of damage to the institution. It is this cover-up, this shifting from parish to parish of offending priests, this determination to put the good name of the church – and its resources – above the sufferings of children that has caused such shock, shame and anger in Ireland, and many other parts of the world.

John Boyne / The Heart's Invisible Furies / Review

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. 
But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he? 

Mairéad Hearne

[ About the Book ]

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

John Boyne: ‘It’s not easy to be a young, gay teenager and to be told that you’re sick … 

particularly when you hear it from someone who groped you on your way to class.’ 

Photograph: Patrick Bolger

John Boyne: ‘The Catholic priesthood blighted my youth and the youth of people like me’

John Boyne – author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – grew up gay in Catholic Dublin. Now, after years of silence he is finally ready to write about sexual abuse within the church – and to talk about the effect it has had on his life

John Boyne
Friday 3 October 2014

O

ver the course of my writing life, I’ve often been asked why I don’t set my novels in Ireland. To this question, I had a stock reply: that I didn’t want to write about my own country until I had a story to tell. Now, having written a book that takes the subject of child abuse in the Irish Catholic church as its theme, I wonder if that answer was entirely honest.

Review

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne review – sin and torment in Catholic Ireland

A picaresque odyssey tracks changing attitudes towards sexual freedoms over the last 70 years and rages against the church

Helen Dunmore

Sat 18 Feb 2017 07.30 GM

John Boyne’s new novel opens in the small west Cork village of Goleen, in 1945, during mass in the parish church. Instead of giving a sermon, Father James Monroe rises to denounce 16-year-old Catherine Goggin, recently discovered to be pregnant. The priest calls her up to the altar to shame her before family and congregation, before kicking her out of the church and banishing her from the parish. Boyne introduces this scene by informing us that it will be known later that this priest has himself fathered two children in the area, and his brutality is inflamed rather then tempered by hypocrisy.

Valentia Island, County Kerry, Ireland. Photograph: Stephen Power

Review

Water by John Boyne review – a cathartic journey of recovery

A woman retreats to a remote Irish island following the collapse of her life, in the first of a series named for the four elements

Barney Norris
Tuesday 23 November 2023

Though perhaps still best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne has been highly productive since the critical success of his 2017 novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies. He is now embarking on a quartet of interlinked novellas, which will appear biannually over the next two years. The cohering theme is the four elements – so Water will be followed in due course by Earth, Air and Fire.

Water is the first of a quartet of interlinked novels named after the elements by John Boyne

Water is the first of a quartet of interlinked novels named after the elements by John Boyne

Mairéad Hearne

[ About Water]

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.

Book review / The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

 

Book review

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Kate Vane

August 17, 2018

The Heart’s Invisible Furies has a familiar premise. A young girl in rural Ireland is pregnant and is driven out of her community by the priest. However, this novel does not tell the tale you might expect.

John Boyne / The Echo Chamber / ‘To err is human, but to foul things up you only need a phone.’

‘To err is human, but to foul things up you only need a phone.’

– The Echo Chamber

Mairéad Hearne

[ About the Book ]

What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept.