some very preliminary thoughts
What is the story
about? The tender opening and
conclusion suggest about Father Clohessy and his sense of helplessness and
anger and not knowing what to say to the
his congregation in the face of a
society of well-fed, consumerists, who
haven’t time for God any more.
In the story, only
he and Justina are pious and she has learning difficulties, but then so does he, so does Maeve unable to deal with her burdens
placed on her, burdens she never thinks of bearing as God’s will. Justina is innocent in that she doesn’t
grasp a very wide world, and desperate
to be forgiven her imaginary sins, but
these are sins which has has internalised from Maeve, surely, her sense of not being wanted, being a drag
on Maeve’s life as enforced carer for her as well as her drinker husband and
helpless father in law neither of whom make any effort to save the garden
turning into a kind of plumber’s dump.
And she is childless.
Her bitterness and
despair foment for lack of companionship and equal love and she has no time for
religion. She laughs away the
confession Justina tells her she,
Justina has to make. Justina is much
more ready to clean the church brass than to lay the table or wash the
dishes. At church she is preserving and
cleansing, stopping things falling
into a mess like her sister’s garden.
Father Clohessy is
moved by Justina’s faith, and feels helpless before it, and she leaves him with
a sense of emptiness. His social round
seems pleasant and pointless. He is still
just about respected as a priest. He is
less able to compromise (if that is the word) with contemporary materialism
than is his colleague, Father Finaghy,
golfer and drinker good socialiser.
He’s driven to talk Maeve for practical reasons as well as moral ones,
that is to prevent her doing drawn into the kind of life her friend Breda is
living (or so everyone assumes). He has
a protective instinct towards her. His
sense of inadequacy is focused most poignantly at the end when he sees her
looking at his face as if it were the face of God Himself.
Justina is able to
have trust. Nobody else in the story
does. There is a sense, perhaps, in the
back of Father Clohessy’s mind that the modern world, for all its greater comfort
and provision, is ultimately unrewarding,
ultimately empty, and perhaps – especially if we allow the other
characters’ judgements on Breda, decadent,
and above all comfortless. Maeve’s situation is not going to
improve. She will get more and more
bitter and unhappy. Breda’s high life prosperity
is surely to be short-lived. Gilfoyle
and his son are close to being ‘wasters’.
But Father Clohessy
can hardly preach all that without alienating his congregation still further
and driving still more of them away.
Only Justina is
comforted, but perhaps by giving her a learning difficulties Trevor is hinting
that her comfort may be over simplistic, or is he coming back to the idea of
simple faith, her learning difficulties
are a kind of metaphor for an inability to learn
the modern world, though this is no
more than hinted at. Trevor has no
political or religious ‘agenda’
In an interview
with the Paris Review Trevor sees himself as religions in a ‘primitive’ sort of
way.
I don’t really think of myself as religious . .
. I only ever go to church in Ireland. I don’t like the Church of England. I
feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that I’d do
anything about it. I always feel that Protestantism in England is strangely
connected with the military. All the cathedrals here are full of military
honors. It’s part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of
honor, that sort of thing. It’s a strange combination. The Protestant Church of
Ireland is a shrunken, withered little church that I’m quite attracted by.
INTERVIEWER
There is a strong element of faith in your work,
of people coping, enduring, of being borne along in their lives. Is it humanist
or spiritual faith?
TREVOR
I don’t think it is humanist; I think it is just
a kind of primitive belief in God. I think that certainly occurs in my books.
I’m always saying that my books are religious; nobody ever agrees with me. I
think there is a sort of God-bothering that goes on from time to time in my
books. People often attack God, say what an unkind and cruel figure he is. It
is outside formal religion; the people who talk about it aren’t, generally
speaking, religious people, but there is a bothering, a gnawing, nagging thing.
In the same
interview he distances himself from what is sometimes called ‘commitment’
writing from a particular social or political point of view. “I am probably politically naïve,” he says.
I’m not at all sure
‘where this story goes’, or ‘what it
means’, but many of the characters seem
to be to be like Biblical ‘villains’,
people who have forgotten God and gone astray. Of course it’s hard to blame Maeve for
her situation, but her bitterness does
seem to express some sort of ‘fallen’ state – directly opposite to and
comparable to the happy fallen state of Breda.
Justina has her
learning difficulty to bear, but she has found a way of bearing it. She has
found something which Father Clohessy himself has, as yet, not found. Hence his
anger, comparable/contrastable to Maeve’s own state of continuous
submerged anger, which might in another age have been direct at God himself (I
did not deserve this!). Justina also does not deserve that endless criticism she gets from Maeve. But
It’s worth
reflecting that the title of the story makes Father Clohessy, Justina’s. He, grammatically at least, belongs to
her. Much more than he does to himself.
He is the representation of God in her eyes, not his own. And this, in another way, is something he
does not deserve.
Finally, perhaps her cleaning and caring for the candles tells us something at a symbolic level.
Finally, perhaps her cleaning and caring for the candles tells us something at a symbolic level.
