Interview John Boyne: "Pedophile priests have left a terrible legacy"
In May 2015, the day of the referendum for equal marriage in Ireland, in a television report they interviewed an elderly man who was leaving one of the polling stations with
his face bathed in tears
.
When asked why he was so excited about casting his vote, he looked directly at the camera and said, “Because for me it is too late.
But it is not too late for everyone else.
24 hours later, when Ireland, a bastion of Catholicism, moral hypocrisy and sexual repression, became the first country to approve full marriage equality, not through a parliamentary vote but through a public plebiscite, the senator was asked David Norris, a university professor, humanist and gay rights activist, if he, in his 70s, was going to make use of the new law.
"I have spent
so much time pushing the boat," he replied, "that I have forgotten to get on it
, and now it has left the harbor behind and is already at sea, but it is nice to see it from here."
I have spent the last twenty years of my life writing novels, but I have never written, nor will I ever write, such
a good phrase
.
The publication of
The Invisible Furies of the Heart
(Salamandra), my tenth novel for adults, the second to take place in Ireland and the first to deal with the lives of gay men in my own country, has led me to remember my own life, the experiences that prompted me to write it, and I realize that there is an
inner conflict
that has been present in me since puberty and that still persists.
To the Mike Pences of the world, those who believe in so-called
"conversion therapy,"
to the self-erected moral guardians of the Iona Institute, and to the poisonous columnists who clamor to see beautiful maidens dancing at the crossroads of the now defunct Ireland of De Valera, let me tell you the following:
I knew I was gay long before I even understood what that word meant
. He had a crush on Danny Amatullo from the
Fame
series
when he was just eight or nine years old. (
Google it
, he was gorgeous.) At 14, I became obsessed with A-Ha singer Morten Harket to such an extent that I ended up embarking on a one-man hate campaign against Norway's best band just because I didn't know how to deal with those emotions that they overflowed and burned inside. And as for Jason Donovan ... Anyway, I better shut up. (For what it's worth: Jason, if you read this, I'm still interested, you just have to tell me when and where.)
But all of this took place at a time when being gay in Ireland was not only frowned upon,
it was outright illegal
. In theory you could end up in jail for doing the things that young people like me were desperate to do and that were exactly the same things that other young people wanted to do, only with girls, and that was correct. (Although, of course, if you were a girl and you did it with a boy, it was not frowned upon either: in Ireland, logic and morals have never gone hand in hand.)
A couple of years ago, at the West Cork Literary Festival, I shared the stage with my great friend the novelist Paul Murray. I spoke of
Traces of Silence
, my novel about sexual abuse within the Irish Catholic Church, and he elaborated on
The mark and the void
, his incisive novel about Irish banks. In short,
the two institutions that have done the most damage to my generation and the next
. During the audience question time, I found myself saying something that until then I had never dared to verbalize: that I spent many years wondering if the reason I was gay was because my first sexual experience had been with a man older than had
a position of authority over me
. That is, if your first sexual relationship marked you for life and if you could define your orientation from that moment on. Of course, now I know that it is not like that, but during my adolescence and well into my twenties that question haunted me. In fact, it wasn't until I reconciled with my past that I was able to write
Traces of Silence
. If he had tried 10 years earlier, it would have been an unreadable tirade.
Similarly, if I had tried to write
The Invisible Furies of the Heart
10 years ago, I would have been more concerned than now about what readers might think of me. Between 2006 and 2008, when
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
was at its peak of popularity, I
hated being asked by journalists about my personal life
, not because being gay was a problem for me, but because I couldn't. understand how relevant that issue was, nor did I want my book to be related to that issue. Even today, in the press or on the internet, I am sometimes described as "openly gay",
as if one should be praised for his sincerity.
I have not yet come across any case in which any of my contemporaries - Donald Ryan, Cecelia Ahern or Kevin Barry, for example - are described as "openly straight", despite the fact that all of them do it with someone of the opposite sex. (If this was a text message, I would add a smiley face.)
But,
fatality and pessimism
aside
, I am quite surprised by the fact that in recent months, when I have discussed
The Invisible Furies of the Heart
with my friends and family, I have always referred to it as a " comic novel ", a genre that I had not touched before and that at times, although I am ashamed to say it,
has made me feel like an intruder
. After all, throughout my literary career I have not stood out precisely for my ability to make people laugh.
There is a phrase that I often repeat in my readings:
my books tend to portray the elderly or lonely children
, but whoever the protagonist is, in the end they all die. I don't mean to be so damned bitter, but all my books seem to be heading to the same place. And when I started
The Invisible Furies of the Heart
, I did it with a similar approach. The idea was to focus on an elderly Irish homosexual man - who had not enjoyed a full life as he had not been able to express his sexuality - and for the reader to see the changes that Ireland had undergone over more than 70 years through his eyes . Of course, in the end he would die alone.
But, to my surprise, it didn't turn out exactly like that. Once I started writing it, I discovered that my storyteller, Cyril Avery, was essentially a kind-hearted, affable, and awkward guy who in his personal life goes from disaster to disaster simply because he cannot be honest with the world. Or rather, the world - Ireland - does not allow him to be honest about himself. However, he did not want him to be permanently unhappy. I wanted him to win. I was thinking of Lucky Jim, and I wanted my Cyril to be a literary descendant of Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon, although, you know - and, forgive me, but that's the only way to put it - he
shits all the time
.
For many years I deliberately avoided writing anything personal in my novels. I wrote about
murderous Edwardians, eighteenth-century cabin boys, and children dealing with the aftermath of war
. But writers change. In my case, gaining experience and security as a writer, the freedom that sold a few books gave me and the fact that I have always felt quite isolated from the authors of my own generation and, increasingly, my own country, They allowed me to step away from purely "made up" stories and explore the experiences that from the beginning guided my adolescent self into the realm of fiction.
Despite the fact that the Cyril of
The Invisible Furies of the Heart was
born a quarter of a century before me, he spends his formative years
just as haunted by his sexuality as I was
, and many of his experiences, though I am ashamed to admit it, mirror those I have. I lived during my youth. There is an excerpt in the novel in which Cyril, who is in love with Julian, his best friend, points out that sex “was a shameful activity that was carried out in a hurry, on the sly, and in the dark.
He associated the sexual act with the night, with the outside, to do it with the shirt on and the pants on the ankles
. I knew the feel of tree bark ripping my palms as I fucked someone in the park and the smell of sap on my face as a stranger rammed me from behind. Sex was not measured by the amount of sighs of pleasure but by the urgency, by the noises of rodents scurrying through the undergrowth and the sound of cars moving in the distance, not to mention the fear that they would advance along those same roads. the relentless sirens of the
garda
, after the phone call of some person shocked and traumatized by what he had seen when taking the dog for a walk. I had never made love under the covers, nor had I fallen asleep hugging a lover between whispers and caresses, while the words faded cradled by tenderness and sleep. I had never woken up with another person or been able to satisfy
that tenacious desire that came over me in the early hours of the morning
with a colleague to whom I should not have to apologize. I could list more sexual partners than anyone I knew, but for me the difference between love and sex came down to six words: I loved Julian; I was fucking strangers.
Of my 10 novels for adults, another five for younger readers, and a compilation of short stories, I think this is perhaps
the most sincere paragraph.
I've never written, since that's how my life was until the late twenties. I come from a generation that felt - still does - a little uncomfortable being gay, a little embarrassed, even though we knew we had no reason for it. I was born and raised in Dublin and have been to The George exactly once in my life. I am lucky enough to travel a lot and would never dream of looking for a gay club in a foreign city (although I don't dislike the idea of a good karaoke bar). It saddens me to admit that many of the romantic experiences in my life, and I am using that phrase in a broad sense, are mirrored in Cyril's. In the late 1990s, when I was in my early 20s and was director of marketing at Waterstone's bookstore in London,he lived in a flat in Battersea conveniently located near Clapham Common. When the new millennium started and I had already returned to Dublin,
The arrival of the internet and with it the chat rooms
, where the phrase "Are you looking for new friends?" it meant nothing more and nothing less than sex. You would meet a figure in the dark, just as desperate as you for a bit of physical affection, and, once the act was complete, it would disappear into the night and would not return to claim anything from you. After which, like Cyril,
you could go home, satisfied and ready for sleep
. Anyway, in my novel, during one of Cyril's most memorable experiences, the sexual intercourse doesn't actually take place and Nelson's Pillar collapses on top of him. Not for less, you dirty party animal.
At some point, of course, things began to change. My first official boyfriend appeared in my life
a week before the publication of my first novel
,
The Time Thief
, in 2000. He attended the book launch, an event that I had dreamed of since I was a teenager. But I would have gotten up and gone right away if he had asked me, so in love I was with him. We were together, on and off, for a couple of years, but what a terrible introduction to relationships! He was cruel
, unstable and controlling
. I remember waiting some distance from his Luke Street flat on a Saturday morning when for some bizarre reason we had to travel to Mullingar to visit her ex-boyfriend, a much older and deeply unpleasant character, and see how
someone he He had hooked up the night before saying goodbye to him at the door
. Of course, since I loved him and was absolutely terrified by his toxic temper, I didn't say anything, hoping that at some point he would change. The scars that relationship left on me have never fully healed.
However, that boyfriend had "come out of the closet" completely, as they say, but not the next one. Tip:
If you're starting to come to terms with being gay, don't date someone who is still terrified of that label
. That is, a person who is willing to have sex as long as he has had enough beers, but pretends the next morning that it never happened.
"It's a lie!" He yelled at me when the relationship became public
. And the friends we had in common, encouraged by an inherent homophobia, preferred to portray me as a mythomaniac, because obviously it is much easier to make fun of the gay uncle than to accept that a scared individual is lying to their faces. "He
at least tries to be straight
"One of those friends told me, a phrase that horrified me at the time but saddens me now. This was the sense of shame that came with being gay at that time. So were the punishments for falling in love. And that was the approval of anyone who turned his back on the truth in order to accept "normality."
But failed relationships aren't the hardest thing a gay man has to deal with. Everyone suffers from them, be they gay or straight. The hardest thing is the relationships that cannot be.
The men we fall in love with knowing that they will never reciprocate our feelings
and that despite everything we cannot stop wishing. These situations can be a real torment. When I was 22 years old, a friend who had discovered that I had a crush on him gave me a hard time. Throughout a scandalous afternoon he belittled me and destroyed me emotionally and then treated me as if I had destroyed his teddy bear by throwing it at the dogs.
Although there was another one who was kind, he gave me a hug at O'Neill's pub and said he would get over it.
and that we would not allow it to affect our relationship. And he was right: I did it and we didn't. But there was also another who, desperate to build a literary career, took advantage of my devotion to him and stuck to me
in search of financial benefits and professional contacts
while making fun of me behind my back. Until he got that long-awaited editing contract and then ...
sayonara
. He didn't need me anymore. (I should be mature enough not to be happy that the book turned out to be a critical and sales disaster, but hey, I'm human.)
Bottom line, I haven't had much success with my love life and I think the same thing happens to a lot of gay people in their 40s. We are more or less between the generation that could never come out of the closet and that of those who announce it from the rooftops when they are teenagers. A friend recently told me that
his 11-year-old son had a classmate who had already come out as gay
. Can you imagine it? Just today, a few hours ago, when I was crossing the Sydney Harbor Bridge, I passed a boy of about 14 years old who said to his friend: «He calls me 'queer' all the time but in reality he
is angry because I do not like it
». I spent the summer of 2016 in London and almost every day I took a long walk around the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. One afternoon I saw two boys of about 16 years walking hand in hand without any concern and I remember feeling envy and, yes, bitterness, for the freedom they enjoyed. That is wrong? Probably, but it was what I felt.
I write these words at a difficult stage in my life. I am typing them from Sydney, a country I love and have visited 10 times in 10 years, after ending an eleven-year relationship with the kindest, most loving and decent man I have ever met. For some reason - I'm not sure which one - in 2016 everything fell apart and now I'm going through some pretty dark times. We all know that a long relationship has ups and downs, but I was convinced that we would grow old together and the end was distressing for both of us. It takes two people to sustain a relationship, also to destroy it, so I am not denying my share of responsibility. But it has been tough. There is no more poetic way to express it.
Anyway, there is my work. And there is
The Invisible Furies of the Heart
. Perhaps Cyril Avery embodies all the people that I could have been, who I am, who I am not, and who I still could be.
The desire to fall in love and share life with someone
is not a homosexual or heterosexual presumption. Is human. We are all dazzled by a pretty face or a good heart. What else can we do but wait for the right person to show up?
It's almost Christmas time and I'm writing at the Fortune of War,
Sydney's oldest pub, the
setting for a famous scene from the movie My Life Begins in Malaysia.
And what is playing on the jukebox?
Take on me
by A-Ha.
I'm not making it up.
Seriously, why write a comic novel if the universe is constantly conspiring to make us laugh?
'The invisible furies of the heart', by John Boyne
Salamander
The eighth novel published in Spain by the author of
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
is a story about machismo and homophobia in post-war Ireland.
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