'For the strangled impulse, there is no redemption." The title and epitaph of William King's first novel stem from Patrick Kavanagh's masterpiece, The Great Hunger, a poem that digs deep into themes of loneliness, connection and yearning. Similar preoccupations afflict the novel's protagonist Fr Brian O'Neill, a young curate who finds himself shipped from a southside sinecure to a working-class parish in north Dublin.
Fr Brian is given scant warning of the new posting. The higher echelons of the Catholic Church issue decrees and, like pawns on a chessboard, Brian and his peers are moved around. The occluded, intriguing world of the clergy is opened up by King, a parish priest at Corpus Christi, Drumcondra, who questions the politics at the heart of the organisation.
Ponderous and soul-searching, the tone of the book lends itself to these questions. A world of cronyism and repression is related without bitterness, rather with the tired exasperation of one who hopes for changes that will never come.
Often the insights are delivered with humour, from the priests who make lewd jokes, to the competitiveness among the brothers on the golf course, to the arch response from junior priests when they are shunted to unwanted postings: “Ours is not to reason why.”
King was educated at Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, and has a master's in Anglo-Irish literature from UCD. The Strangled Impulse is a reissue of his debut novel, first published in 1997. He is the author of three other novels, most recently Is That All There Is?, published by Lilliput last year.
Wealthy Dublin
In its setting, plot and character, the novel, has parallels with another recently published book. John Boyne’s
A History of Loneliness
also sees its priestly protagonist ousted from a long-standing sinecure, at a wealthy Dublin school, and posted to a parish on the north side. Whereas Boyne’s book focuses on the clergy’s abuse of boys, and the collective guilt of the nation, King’s novel is an altogether quieter study of a priesthood in crisis.
A common thread in both works is protagonists who have lost their sense of purpose. In Beechwood Fr Brian was integrated into the community – dinners at parishioners’ homes, head of a dynamic youth programme, with a mentor and friend in his superior Tim Sheridan – but in Melrose people have little time for religion, less still for plámás-ing priests, who are viewed as an elite by the working-class laity.
This is the 1970s. Money troubles and high crime rates take precedence for the parishioners. Brian looks to his fellow priests for support and finds instead a two-faced friend in Fr Dick Hegarty and a parish priest, Leo Brannigan, who is a hardline Catholic curmudgeon: “That social worker bitch, Harding, is up to her tricks again. She’s advising silly women to walk out on their husbands if they say a cross word to them . . . she’s been telling them to go on the Pill.”
Hypocrisy and misogyny
Brannigan and Hegarty are particularly well-drawn characters, embodying the hypocrisy, misogyny and malfeasance that have been at the heart of the church’s decline in Ireland over the past four decades.
It is interesting to revisit a time when this rule was iron-clad, an Ireland where the church had a huge following, both young and old.
In an afterword, King speaks of his own idealism and enthusiasm as a curate: “We were eager to shatter the image of the staid generation of priests . . . John Paul II’s visit attracted a sea of saffron and white.”
In 1997, when The Strangled Impulse was first published, this following had dwindled significantly in the wake of the clerical abuse scandals. Seventeen years later, it is further diminished. King's book picks apart the reasons why this happened, "the darkness at the heart of the priesthood", from the perspective of an honest and disappointed disciple.
The vow of celibacy, “a white martyrdom”, is examined in detail. Foreshadowing Brian’s torments is best friend Paul, who leaves the church when he falls in love. The reaction this provokes from the parents is a reminder that the church was not the only unit exerting rigid control over its youth. Many a vocation materialised, as Brian points out, under familial instruction.
Overcome with loneliness and apathy in his new parish, Brian finds solace in the straight-talking married school teacher, Niamh Kirwan.
As their relationship develops, he is torn between his vocation and his desire. A pattern of yearning, guilt and wavering resolution kicks in and is difficult to break: “Isn’t it a denial of what is probably the most pleasurable experience there is?”
This strangled impulse at the centre of the book makes for an engaging and poignant read.
