AustLit

'The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed systemic mistreatment of vulnerable children over decades. Though these crimes have not been the exclusive province of the Catholic Church, its education system has brought more children into intimate care by religious orders, and even those never abused have observed the tics of brutality in some of their teachers and mentors. In a note at the end of his new novel, In Whom We Trust, John Clanchy mentions James Joyce’s hell-fire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the recurrence of these ‘tropes of terror’ in the rhetoric he heard as a Catholic schoolboy in 1960s Melbourne. The system has long-standing practices of psychological control.' (Introduction)

'This tragic story begins in a Catholic presbytery in rural ­Victoria. Father Pearse is reading news of the battlefields of World War I: “The reports discharged their usual cargo of misery.” And so the mood is set for the narrative to breathe with the deepest, darkest, most agonising melancholy. While two of the young characters will be killed at the front, and the priest will be left with the torment of his own moral failure, the church itself will be exposed as a single-minded glaring powerhouse of corruption, a “massive theological boulder” blocking the path of truth.' (Introduction)