“Communication” by John Doyle – A charged introduction to Sin and Consolation | imaginary

CDoyle’s first novel tells the story of Mac O’Brien, a young man who went to seminary to study for the priesthood but was asked to leave because he had no real calling, so he returned to his family home in Wales to decide what to do with his life. He finds himself drawn to take part in a local theater production – playing a schoolboy in Owen Shears’ now-legendary The Passion of Port Talbot, an immersive, community-led re-enactment of the crucifixion that took place over several days in Port Talbot in 2012, starring Michael Sheen.

Mac is recruited after a steel worker from the factory where he works as a security guard exits the show. One might think that this would be enough material to actually write a novel, but it all becomes more or less background noise when Mac agrees to take part in the play, and bumps into Siwan, a young woman he was close to at school. Siwan’s mother was an environmental activist and ended up going to prison for her protests. Siwan had visited him in the seminary the day he agreed to leave the priesthood and said to him: “Forgive me, Father, for I am about to make a mistake.” The nature of the sin she intends to commit becomes the focus of the novel.

They weren’t exactly a couple, Siuan and Mac – they never slept together, never kissed, never talked at school. What they shared were nights at the Plaza Cinema, where they would sit together in the dark watching movies, and Siwan would let her leg rest on Mac’s. This was their only point of contact, and from the way he interacts with his parents nowadays, one suspects that it may have been practically the only point of real human contact Mac ever had – he certainly couldn’t talk to his father, and could only talk to his mother about God, the local priest, and television. How heartbreaking, then, that Siwan’s current interest in Mac seems tied to his job as a security guard at the Port Talbot steel plant, which we quickly learn she plans to blow up during the weekend of the play. Businesses will be closed for strike action to draw attention to proposed layoffs. Siwan’s plan is to take advantage of them being empty and detonate a bomb without killing anyone. But of course, to do this, you need to get a bomb on site. Lucky for her, the boy who had been missing her at school could make that possible.

There is so much in this rich, involving, and emotionally charged book. It’s more than can stay in focus all the way through, and some elements of the action recede as the narrative unfolds. Mac’s mother’s illness and the deaths of his grandparents remain horrific but largely off-stage sorrows. Once a strike is determined, it is never revisited. The play ceases to matter; Mac misses the crucifixion, calling it “ridiculous,” and by the time he comes across a Roman centurion lying on the sand dune, having donned his priest’s robes for the bombing, the plot has begun to feel like a MacGuffin, or perhaps more accurately a simple allegory for the true heart of the matter. The novel eventually becomes something more focused and intense – it is the story of a man who got off to a false start in life, revisiting the closed site of his youth and haunting it, unable to enter again. He faces immense loneliness and is manipulated by the one person who seemed to offer a way out of his isolation. Ultimately, it becomes a novel about nihilism—seeing no way out of a dead-end future, Mac decides to help someone blow up the whole place, simply because he cared about her at least once. It is destroyed through pain.