This book review appeared in the Weekend Australian on July 30th 2005. It's a wonderful novel that I recently finished myself and well worth taking a look at.
Children marked out by unholy abuse.
By Liam Davison
Madigan Perry's Luck
By Robert Parsons
Morgan Ramsay Press
Everyone, they say, has a story to tell. And some stories demand to be told to give voice to personal experience and to honour the shared experience of those unable to speak. Robert Parsons, a former pupil and educator in the Australian Catholic school system, has a harrowing story to tell about the abuse of power and its long term effect on children.
While he goes to some length to declare his unreserved respect for individual members of the church and to acknowledge the risk of unfairly focusing on the Catholic Church when similar abuses have occurred elsewhere, Parsons harbours a deep resentment towards the institution that betrayed the trust placed in it when he was put in its care.
This, his first novel, goes some way towards exorcising his demons and perhaps to making amends for those whose stories have yet to be told. It is an unashamedly cathartic novel with an agenda: whether fiction is the most effective forum to air grievances and expose past injustices in the hope of preventing their recurrence is another question.
Madigan Perry's Luck tells of Anthony Perry and Billy Burrows negotiating their way through the Catholic school system of the 1950's and 60's. The litany of abuses they endure, from public humiliation and gratuitous corporal punishment to sexual interference, and the calculated manipulation of their developing sense of self-worth are no less disturbing for their familiarity to a readership inured to the findings of recent journalistic investigations and public inquiries. There's an awful sense of inevitability about the way the story unfolds, an unfortunate testament to the extent to which such abuses have entered public consciousness.
Miserable Catholic childhoods have proven fertile territory for generations of writers, many of whom found some wry humour to balance an otherwise unrelenting bleakness afforded by the combination of institutionalized narrow-mindedness and poverty that exposes children to the predatory inclinations of men who are often victims of the same processes they enforce. Some have tempered their bitterness with forgiveness and understanding. While Parsons' contribution to the genre contextualizes, without excusing, the experiences it recounts and moves towards its own form of redemptive conclusion, it is still more Devil's Playground than Angela's Ashes, offering little in lightness or humour. Perhaps necessarily, there is little joy to be found.
Parsons' characters are composites rather than the novel operating as thinly veiled roman-a-clef, yet many will be recognizable to those who experienced the Catholic education system. Anthony Perry is a social outcast for his Protestant surname and the shame of having divorced parents. Sister Mary Geraldine, the "Wart Nun", asks the class to pray for him as he has been impure with another boy and has been taken by the devil. Sister Mary Agnes delights in caning boys who fail to genuflect, as they don't yet know the meaning of the word. Father Ryan betrays the confidentiality of the confessional and exploits his naïve charges for perverted sexual gratification. Brother Grothan uses violence and intimidation to control his classes.
Not all readers with Catholic backgrounds will welcome this book but, then, as Parsons points out, not all shared the same experiences and thankfully not all in the system fit the mould from which he has cast his characters. But many do. For those who persist in saying that institutionalized abuse of power did no lasting harm, Parsons is at pains to make the case that it did cause significant harm to people.
catholic
book review
child abuse
Religion
