Escaping from the tribe

Crimes of the The Father, by Thomas Keneally

March 11th, 2019

This 2018 novel personalizes the abuse of children by Australian Catholic clergy through several archetype characters that both interact in a 2-month span in 1996 and who are shown in flashbacks from prior decades and flashforwards to the present. It engages with the human dimension of the pain and suffering of the teen victims at the time and the lifelong consequences thereafter. Keneally always writes vivid, multi-faceted, and honest characters. This skill is likewise applied to several members of the Church, including an engaging predator, the archbishop and senior lay leaders trying to suppress the consequences, and a heroic priest-psychologist who tells the Church it needs to confront this horror rather than repress it. But humanizing the predators and his protectors makes for deeply uncomfortable reading, and you have to wonder how intentional that is by Keneally. He waited until the mid 2010s to write this even though the issue leapt to public attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Why wait so long? In a preface Keneally discusses his life as a Catholic, including the time he went to seminary and neared ordination before dropping out. He remains a man of faith, loyal—as his books attest—to the Irish diaspora experience that included a heroic role for the iron spine of the Church. While the book conveys a look from the inside of the Church—and the rationales and language used to disguise what was done to the children and the intent of the cover-ups is conveyed with astounding impact—still it seems that Keneally laments the damage to the church as much or more as he is enraged by the abuse.  That said, it contains many of his trademark style elements. The writing is accessible rather than dense, yet buried within are wonderful metaphors and vignettes that bring forth one or another light or hard emotion in the reader. He writes dialogue as well as any writer ever has, and both his male and female characters are fully realized. Above all, he is great at local color, and the Australianness, the Irishness, the Church milieu are brilliantly rendered.

If you are new to Keneally, you are in for a treat. He has had several literary lives. I’ve read perhaps 10-12 of his works, and that is but a third or so of his output. Many of his early works are psychological investigations of points in historic time—A Walk in the Forest, Book Red/Sister Rose—that remain astounding pieces. Schindler’s Ark fits in this category. He has a family tie to the USA and has a fascination with the Civil War era. Unfortunately, his novel Confederates both humanizes and romanticizes the southern traitors, perhaps because the Scots-Irish that are his people were the backbone of the rebel forces. I’ve resisted reading his Lincoln biography but will probably give in soon.  Yet the literary life that alone would make him worth reading far into the future is the Australian centered novels. Two of his major works are top 100 novels—Woman of the Inner Sea and A River Town are simply wonderful. A much less successful novel is the Daughters of Mars about Australian nurses and troops across the full span of WW1—it is action with little understanding emerging, hence more of a screenplay than a true novel. These novelizations of the bush life/white settler life/Aussie war-making are somewhat expected given his background.  Less expected are the forays into other psychologies. While he says he would not now write The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, with an Aboriginal protagonist, he was brave enough to do it earlier, and glad that he was. Several books feature the emigration to Australia of European refugees after WW2, including those with dark pasts in the bloodlands, and how that earlier life lingers on and on in the new setting. If there is one meta theme across his work, it is the way that nature and the collective history of the person’s ‘tribe’ create a world they only partially understand and cannot fully escape. Tragedy lurks off stage until it appears with red fangs in person or in the terror of nightmare. Dealing with the disruptive potential of the underlying forces we dimly perceive is one of greatest challenges of adulthood. In Keneally we have a [mostly] successful guide.